The Invisible Committee - The Coming Insurrection

The Invisible Committee

The Coming Insurrection

semiotext(e)
intervention
series □ 1

SEMIOTEXT(E) INTERVENTION SERIES
© 2009 by The Invisible Committee

Originally published as L’insurrection qui vient by Editions La
Fabrique, Paris, 2007.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, elec-
tronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without prior permission of the publisher.

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ISBN; 978-1-58435-080 -4

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and London, England

Printed in the United States of America

The Invisible Committee

The Coming Insurrection

semiotext(e)

intervention
series □ 1

The book you hold in your hands has become the princi-
ple piece of evidence in an anti-terrorism case in France
directed against nine hidividuals who were arrested on
November 1 1, 2008, mostly in the village of Tamac.
They have been accused of "criminal association for the
purposes of terrorist activity " on the grounds that they
were to have participated in the sabotage of overhead
electrical lines on France’s national railways. Although
only scant circumstantial evidence has been presented
against the nine, the French Interior Minister has pub-
lically associated them with the emergent threat of an
“ ultra-left ” movement, taking care to single out this
book, described as a "manual for terrorism," which they
are accused of authoring. What follows is the text of the
book preceded by the first statement of the Invisible
Committee since the arrests.

5

Contents

Introduction: A point of clarification 9

From whatever angle... 23

First Circle 29

Second Circle 35

Third Circle 43

Fourth Circle 52

Fifth Circle 63

Sixth Circle 73

Seventh Circle 85

Get Going! 95

Find Each Other 97

Get Organized 103

Insurrection 117

Introduction

A POINT OF CLARIFICATION

Everyone agrees. It’s about to explode. It is acknowl-
edged, with a serious and self-important look, in the
corridors of the Assembly, just as yesterday it was
repeated in the caf^s. There is a certain pleasure in
calculating the risks. Already, we are presented with a
detailed menu of preventive measures for securing
the territory. The New Years festivities take a decisive
turn — “Next year there’ll be no oysters, enjoy them
while you can!” To prevent the celebrations from
being totally eclipsed by the traditional disorder,
36,000 cops and 16 helicopters are rushed out by
Alliot-Marie 1 — the same clown who, during the high
school demonstrations in December, tremulously
watched for the slightest sign of a Greek contamina-
tion, readying the police apparatus just in case. We
can discern more clearly every day, beneath the reas-
suring drone, the noise of preparations for open war.
It’s impossible to ignore its cold and pragmatic
implementation, no longer even bothering to present
itself as an operation of pacification.

The newspapers conscientiously draw up the list of
causes for the sudden disquiet. There is the financial

1. Michele Alliot-Marie, the French Interior Minister.

9

crisis, of course, with its booming unemployment, its
share of hopelessness and of social plans, its Kernel
and Madoff scandals. There is the failure of the educa-
tional system, its dwindling production of workers and
citizens, even with the children of the middle class as
its raw material. There is the existence of a youth to
which no political representation corresponds, a youth
good for nothing but destroying the free bicycles that
society so conscientiously put at their disposal.

None of these worrisome subjects should appear
insurmountable in an era whose predominant mode
of government is precisely the management of crises.
Unless we consider that what power is confronting is
neither just another crisis, nor just a succession of
chronic problems, of more or less anticipated
bances, but a singular peril: that a form of
has emerged, and positions have been taken up, that
are no longer manageable.

Those who everywhere make up this peril have to
ask themselves more than the trifling questions
about causes, or the probabilities of inevitable move-
ments and confrontations. They need to ask how, for
instance, does the Greek chaos resonate in the
French situation? An uprising here cannot be the
simple transposition of what happened over there.
Global civil war still has its local specificities. In
France a situation of generalized rioting would
provoke an explosion of another tenor.

10 / The Coming Insurrection

The Greek rioters are faced with a weak state, while
being able to take advantage of a strong popularity.
One must not forget that it was against the Regime
of the Colonels that, only thirty years ago, democracy
reconstituted itself on the basis of a practice of polit-
ical violence. This violence, whose memory is not so
distant, still seems intuitive to most Greeks. Even the
leaders of the socialist party have thrown a molotov or
two in their youth. Yet classical politics is equipped
with variants that know very well how to accommo-
date these practices and to extend their ideological
rubbish to the very heart of the riot. If the Greek
battle wasn’t decided, and put down, in the streets —
the police being visibly outflanked there — its because
its neutralization was played out elsewhere. There is
nothing more draining, nothing more fatal, than this
classical politics, with its dried up rituals, its thinking
without thought, its little closed world.

In France, our most exalted socialist bureaucrats
have never been anything other than shriveled husks
filling up the halls of the Assembly. Here everything
conspires to annihilate even the slightest form of
political intensity. Which means that it is always
possible to oppose the citizen to the delinquent in a
quasi-linguistic operation that goes hand in hand with
quasi-military operations. The riots of November 2005
and, in a different context, the social movements in the
autumn of 2007, have already provided several prece-
dents. The image of right wing students in Nanterre

hlroducl bn: A point of clarification / 1 1

applauding as the police expelled their classmates
offers a small glimpse of what the future holds in store.

It goes without saying that the attachment of the
French to the state. — the guarantor of universal values,
the last rampart against the disaster — is a pathology
that is difficult to undo. It’s above all a fiction that no
longer knows how to carry on. Our governors them-
selves increasingly consider it as a useless encumbrance
because they, at least, take the conflict for what it is —
militarily. They have no complex about sending in
elite antiterrorist units to subdue riots, or to liberate
a recycling center occupied by its workers. As the
welfare state collapses, we see the emergence of a brute
conflict between those who desire order and those
who don’t. Everything that French politics has been
able to deactivate is in the process of unleashing itself.
It will never be able to process all that it has
repressed. In the advanced degree of social decompo-
sition, we can count on the coming movement to
find the necessary breath of nihilism. Which will not
mean that it won’t be exposed to other limits.

Revolutionary movements do not spread by
contamination but by resonance. Something that is
constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted
by something constituted over there. A body that
resonates does so according to its own mode. An
insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire — a linear
process which spreads from place to place after an initial
spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal

12 / The Coming Insurreclion

points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in
imposing the rhythm of their own vibrations, always
taking on more density. To the point that any return
to normal is no longer desirable or even imaginable.

When we speak of Empire we name the mecha-
nisms of power that preventively and surgically stifle
any revolutionary potential in a situation. In this
sense, Empire is not an enemy that confronts us
head-on. It is a rhythm that imposes itself, a way of
dispensing and dispersing reality. Less an order of the
world than its sad, heavy and militaristic liquidation.

What we mean by the party of insurgents is the
sketching out of a completely other composition , an
other side of reality, which from Greece to the French
banlieues 2 is seeking its consistency.

It is now publicly understood that crisis situations are
so many opportunities for the restructuring of dom-
ination. This is why Sarkozy can announce, without
seeming to lie too much, that the financial crisis is
“the end of a world,” and that 2009 will see France
enter a new era. This charade of an economic crisis is
supposed to be a novelty: we are supposed to be in
the dawn of a new epoch where we will all join
together in fighting inequality and global warming.
But for our generation — which was born in the crisis
and has known nothing but economic, financial,

2. BanUeue French ghettoes, usually located in the suburban periphery.

Introduction: A point of clarification / 13

social and ecological crisis — this is rather difficult to
accept. They won’t fool us again, with another round
of "Now we start all over again” and “It’s just a question
of tightening our belts for a little while.” To tell the
truth, the disastrous unemployment figures no longer
arouse any feeling in us. Crisis is a means of govern-
ing. In a world that seems to hold together only
through the infinite management of its own collapse.

What this war is being fought over is not various
ways of managing society, but irreducible and irrec-
oncilable ideas of happiness and their worlds. We
know it, and so do the powers that be. The militant
remnants that observe us — always more numerous,
always more identifiable — are tearing out their hair
trying to fit us into little compartments in their little
heads. They hold out their arms to us the better to
suffocate us, with their failures, their paralysis, their
stupid problematics. From elections to "transitions,”
militants will never be anything other than that which
distances us, each time a little farther, from the possi-
bility of communism. Luckily we will accommodate
neither treason nor deception for much longer.

The past has given us far too many bad answers
for us not to see that the mistakes were in the ques-
tions themselves. There is no need to choose between
the fetishism of spontaneity and organizational
control; between the "come one, come all” of activist
networks and the discipline of hierarchy; between
acting desperately now and waiting desperately for

14 / The Coming Insurrection

later; between bracketing that which is to be lived
and experimented in the name of a paradise that
seems more and more like a hell the longer it is put
off, and repeating, with a corpse-filled mouth, that
planting carrots is enough to dispel this nightmare.

Organizations are obstacles to organizing ourselves.

In truth, there is no gap between what we are, what
we do, and what we are becoming. Organizations —
political or labor, fascist or anarchist — always begin by
separating, practically, these aspects of existence. It’s
then easy for them to present their idiotic formalism as
the sole remedy to this separation. To organize is not to
give a structure to weakness. It is above all to form
bonds — bonds that are by no means neutral — terrible
bonds. The degree of organization is measured by the
intensity of sharing — material and spiritual.

From now on, to materially organize for survival is
to materially organize for attack. Everywhere, a new
idea of communism is to be elaborated. In theshadows
of bar rooms, in print shops, squats, farms, occupied
gymnasiums, new complicities are to be born. These
precious connivances must not be refused the neces-
sary means for the deployment of their forces.

Here lies the truly revolutionary potentiality of
the present. The increasingly frequent skirmishes
have this formidable quality; that they are always an
occasion for complicities of this type, sometimes
ephemeral, but sometimes also unbetrayable. When a
few thousand young people find the determination

htroduction: A point o( clarification / 1 5

to assail this world, you’d have to be as stupid as a cop
to seek out a financial trail, a leader, or a snitch.

Two centuries of capitalism and market nihilism have
brought us to the most extreme alienations — from our
selves, from others, from worlds. The fiction of the
individual has decomposed at the same speed that it
was becoming real. Children of the metropolis, we offer
this wager: that it’s in the most profound deprivation of
existence, perpetually stifled, perpetually conjured
away, that the possibility of communism resides.

When all is said and done, it’s with an entire
anthropology that we are at war. With the very idea
of man.

Communism then, as presupposition andzs, exper-
iment. Sharing of a sensibility and elaboration of
sharing. The uncovering of what is common and the
building of a force. Communism as the matrix of a
meticulous, audacious assault on domination. As a
call and as a name for all worlds resisting imperial
pacification, all solidarities irreducible to the reign of
commodities, all friendships assuming the necessities
of war. COMMUNISM. We know it’s a term to be used
with caution. Not because, in the great parade of
words, it may no longer be very fashionable. But
because our worst enemies have used it, and continue
to do so. We insist. Certain words are like battle-
grounds: their meaning, revolutionary or reactionary,
is a victory, to be torn from the jaws of struggle.

16 / The Conning Insurrection

Deserting classical politics means facing up to war,
which is also situated on the terrain of language. Or
rather, in the way that words, gestures and life are
inseparably linked. If one puts so much effort into
imprisoning as terrorists a few young communists who
are supposed to have participated in publishing The
Coming Insurrection, it is not because of a “thought
crime,” but rather because they might embody a
certain consistency between acts and thought. Some-
thing which is rarely treated with leniency.

What these people are accused of is not to have
written a book, nor even to have physically attacked
the sacrosanct flows that irrigate the metropolis. It’s
that they might possibly have confronted these fl ows
with the density of a political thought and position.
That an act could have made sense according to
another consistency of the world than the deserted
one of Empire. Anti-terrorism claims to attack the
possible future of a “criminal association.” But what
is really being attacked is the future of the situation.
The possibility that behind every grocer a few bad
intentions are hiding, and behind every thought, the
acts that it calls for. The possibility expressed by an
idea of politics — anonymous but welcoming, conta-
gious and uncontrollable — which cannot be relegated
to the storeroom of freedom of expression.

There remains scarcely any doubt that youth will
be the first to savagely confront power. These last few
years, from the riots of Spring 2001 in Algeria to

Introduction: A point o( clarification / 1 7

those of December 2008 in Greece, are nothing but
a series of warning signs in this regard. Those who 30
or 40 years ago revolted against their parents will not
hesitate to reduce this to a conflict between genera-
tions, if not to a predictable symptom of adolescence.

The only future of a “generation” is to be the
preceding one. On a route that leads inevitably to
the cemetery.

Tradition would have it that everything begins
with a “social movement.” Especially at a moment
when the left, which has still not finished decom-
posing, hypocritically tries to regain its credibility in
the streets. Except that in the streets it no longer has
a monopoly. Just look at how, with each new mobi-
lization of high school students — as with everything
the left still dares to support — a rift continually
widens between their whining demands and the level
of violence and determination of the movement.

From this rift we must make a trench.

If we see a succession of movements hurrying one
after the other, without leaving anything visible
behind them, it must nonetheless be admitted that
something persists. A powder trail links what in each
event has not let itself be captured by the absurd
temporality of the withdrawal of a new law, or some
other pretext. In fits and starts, and in its own rhythm,
we are seeing something like a force take shape. A force
that does not serve its time but imposes it, silently.

It is no longer a matter of foretelling the collapse

18 / The Coming Insurrection

or depicting the possibilities of joy. Whether it comes
sooner or later, the point is to prepare for it. Its not a
question of providing a schema for what an insurrec-
tion should be, but of taking the possibility of an
uprising for what it never should have ceased being: a
vital impulse of youth as much as a popular wisdom.
If one knows how to move, the absence of a schema is
not an obstacle but an opportunity. For the insur-
gents, it is the sole space that can guarantee the
essential: keeping the initiative. What remains to be
created, to be tended as one tends a fire, is a certain
outlook, a certain tactical fever, which once it has
emerged, even now, reveals itself as determinant — and
a constant source of determination. Already certain
questions have been revived that only yesterday may
have seemed grotesque or outmoded; they need to be
seized upon, not in order to respond to them defini-
tively, but to make them live. Having posed them
anew is not the least of the Greek uprising’s virtues:

How does a situation of generalized rioting become
an insurrectionary situation? What to do once the
streets have been taken, once the police have been
soundly defeated there? Do the parliaments still
deserve to be attacked? What is the practical meaning
of deposing power locally? How do we decide? How
do we subsist!

How do we find each other?

— Invisible Committee, January 2009

Introduction: A point ol clarification / 1 9

From whatever angle you approach it, the present
offers no way out. This is not the least of its virtues.
From those who seek hope above all, it tears away
every firm ground. Those who claim to have solu-
tions are contradicted almost immediately. Everyone
agrees that things can only get worse. “The future has
no future” is the wisdom of an age that, for all its
appearance of perfect normalcy, has reached the level
of consciousness of the first punks.

The sphere of political representation has come to a
close. From left to right, it’s the same nothingness
striking the pose of an emperor or a savior, the same
sales assistants adjusting their discourse according to
the findings of the latest surveys. Those who still vote
seem to have no other intention than to desecrate the
ballot box by voting as a pure act of protest. We’re
beginning to suspect that it’s only against voting itself
that people continue to vote. Nothing we’re being
shown is adequate to the situation, not by far. In its
very silence, the populace seems infinitely more
mature than all these puppets bickering among

23

themselves about how to govern it. The ramblings of
any Belleville chibani' contain more wisdom than all
the declarations of our so-called leaders. The lid on
the social kettle is shut triple-tight, and the pressure
inside continues to build. From out of Argentina,
the specter of Que Se Vayan Todos 2 is beginning to
seriously haunt the ruling class.

The flames of November 2005 still flicker in every-
one’s minds. Those first joyous fires were the baptism
of a decade full of promise. The media fable of “ ban -
lieue vs. the Republic” may work, but what it gains in
effectiveness it loses in truth. Fires were lit in the city
centers, but this news was methodically suppressed.
Whole streets in Barcelona burned in solidarity, but no
one knew about it apart from the people living there.
And it’s not even true that the country has stopped
burning. Many different profiles can be found among
the arrested, with little that unites them besides a
hatred for existing society — not class, race, or even
neighborhood. What was new wasn’t the “ banlieue
revolt,” since that was already going on in the ’80s, but
the break with its established forms. These assailants
no longer listen to anybody, neither to their Big

1 . Chibani is Arabic for old man, here referring to the old men who
play backgammon in the cafes of Belleville, a largely immigrant
neighborhood in Paris.

2. They All Must Go! the chant of the 2001 Argentine rebellion.

24 / The Coming Insurrection

Brothers and Big Sisters, nor to the community organi-
zations charged with overseeing the return to normal.
No “SOS Racism’ 3 could sink its cancerous roots into
this event, whose apparent conclusion can be credited
only to fatigue, falsification and the media omerta . 4
This whole series of nocturnal vandalisms and anony-
mous attacks, this wordless destruction, has widened
the breach between politics and the political. No one
can honestly deny the obvious: this was an assault that
made no demands, a threat without a message, and it
had nothing to do with “politics.” One would have to
be oblivious to the autonomous youth movements of
the last 30 years not to see the purely political character
of this resolute negation of politics. Like lost children
we trashed the prized trinkets of a society that deserves
no more respect than the monuments of Paris at the
end of the Bloody Week 5 — and knows it.

There will be no social solution to the present situa-
tion. First, because the vague aggregate of social
milieus, institutions, and individualized bubbles that
is called, with a touch of antiphrasis, “society,” has no

3. A French Anti Racist NGO set up by Francois Mitterand s Social
ist Party in the ’80s.

4. The mafia "code of silence”: absolutely no cooperation with state
authorities or reliance on their services.

5. The battle that crushed the Paris Commune of 1 871 , during which
hundreds of buildings around Paris were torched by the communards.

From whatever ariQ ife... / 25

consistency. Second, because there’s no longer any
language for common experience. And we cannot
share wealth if we do not share a language. It took half
a century of struggle around the Enlightenment to
make the French Revolution possible, and a century
of struggle around work to give birth to the fearsome
“welfare state.” Struggles create the language in which
a new order expresses itself. But there is nothing like
that today. Europe is now a continent gone broke that
shops secretly at discount stores and has to fly budget
airlines if it wants to travel at all. No "problems”
framed in social terms admit of a solution. The ques-
tions of "pensions,” of "job security,” of "young peo-
ple” and their “violence” can only be held in suspense
while the situation these words serve to cover up is
continually policed for signs of further unrest.
Nothing can make it an attractive prospect to wipe
the asses of pensioners for minimum wage. Those
who have found less humiliation and more advantage
in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not turn
in their weapons, and prison won’t teach them to love
society. Cuts to their monthly pensions will under-
mine the desperate pleasure-seeking of hordes of
retirees, making them stew and splutter about the
refusal to work among an ever larger segment of youth.
And finally, no guaranteed income granted the day
after a quasi-uprising will be able to lay the foundation
of a new New Deal, a new pact, a new peace. The
social feeling has already evaporated too much for that.

26 / The Coming Insurrection

As an attempted solution, the pressure to ensure
that nothing happens , together with police surveil-
lance of the territory, will only intensify. The
unmanned drone that flew over Seine-Saint-Denis 6
last July l4th — as the police later confirmed — pre-
sents a much more vivid image of the future than all
the fuzzy humanistic projections. That they were
careful to assure us that the drone was unarmed gives
us a clear indication of the road we’re headed down.
The territory will be partitioned into ever more
restricted zones. Highways built around the borders
of “problem neighborhoods” already form invisible
walls closing off those areas from the middle-class
subdivisions. Whatever defenders of the Republic
may think, the control of neighborhoods “by the
community’ is manifestly the most effective means
available. The purely metropolitan sections of the
country, the main city centers, will go about their
opulent lives in an ever more crafty, ever more
sophisticated, ever more shimmering deconstruc-
tion. They will illuminate the whole planet with
their glaring neon lights, as the patrols of the BAC 7
and private security companies (i.e. paramilitary

6. Banlieue northeast of Paris, where, on October 27, 2005, two
teenagers were killed as they fled the police, setting off the 2005 riots.

7. Brigade Anti Criminalite plainclothes cops who act as an anti gang
force in the tanlieues but also in demonstrations, often operating as a
gang themselves in competition for territory and resources.

From whatever angle. ..127

units) proliferate under the umbrella of an increas-
ingly shameless judicial protection.

The impasse of the present, everywhere in evidence,
is everywhere denied. There will be no end of psy-
chologists, sociologists, and literary hacks applying
themselves to the case, each with a specialized jargon
from which the conclusions are especially absent.
It’s enough to listen to the songs of the times — the
asinine “alt-folk' where the petty bourgeoisie dissects
the state of its soul, next to declarations of war from
Mafia K’l Fry* — to know that a certain coexistence
will end soon, that a decision is near.

This book is signed in the name of an imaginary
collective. Its contributors are not its authors. They
were content merely to introduce a little order into
the common-places of our time, collecting some of
the murmurings around barroom tables and behind
closed bedroom doors. They’ve done nothing more
than lay down a few necessary truths, whose universal
repression fills psychiatric hospitals with patients,
and eyes with pain. They’ve made themselves scribes
of the situation. It’s the privileged feature of radical
circumstances that a rigorous application of logic leads
to revolution. It’s enough just to say what is before
our eyes and not to shrink from the conclusions.

8. Popular French rap group.

28 / The Coming Insurrection

First Circle

"I AM WHAT I AM"

“I AM WHAT I AM.” This is marketing’s latest offering
to the world, the final stage in the development of
advertising, far beyond all the exhortations to be
different, to be oneself and drink Pepsi. Decades of
concepts in order to get where we are, to arrive at
pure tautology. 1 = 1. He’s running on a treadmill in
front of the mirror in his gym. She’s coming back
from work behind the wheel of her Smart car. Will
they meet?

“I AM WHAT I AM.” My body belongs to me. I am
me, you are you, and somethings wrong. Mass per-
sonalization. Individualization of all conditions —
life, work and misery. Diffuse schizophrenia. Ram-
pant depression. Atomization into fine paranoiac
particles. Hysterization of contact. The more I
want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The
more I express myself, the more I am drained. The
more I run after myself, the more tired I get. We
treat our Self like a boring box ofice. We’ve become
our own representatives in a strange commerce,
guarantors of a personalization that feels, in the end,
a lot more like an amputation. We insure our selves

29

to the point of bankruptcy, with a more or less dis-
guised clumsiness.

Meanwhile, I manage. The quest for a self, my
blog, my apartment, the latest fashionable crap,
relationship dramas, who’s fucking who. .. whatever
prosthesis it takes to hold onto an “I”! If “society
hadn’t become such a definitive abstraction, then it
would denote all the existential crutches that allow
me to keep dragging on, the ensemble of dependen-
cies I’ve contracted as the price of my identity. The
handicapped are the model citizens of tomorrow. It’s
not without foresight that the associations exploiting
them today demand that they be granted a “subsis-
tence income.”

The injunction, everywhere, to “be someone” main-
tains the pathological state that makes this society
necessary. The injunction to be strong produces the
very weakness by which it maintains itself, so that
everything seems to take on a therapeutic character,
even working, even love. All those “ How’s it goings?”
that we exchange give the impression of a society
composed of patients taking each other’s tempera-
ture. Sociability is now made up of a thousand little
niches, a thousand little refuges where you can take
shelter. Where it’s always better than the bitter cold
outside. Where everything’s false, since it’s all just a
pretext for getting warmed up. Where nothing can
happen since we’re all too busy shivering silently

30/ The Comhg Insurrection

together. Soon this society will only be held together
by the mere tension of all the social atoms straining
towards an illusory cure. It’s a power plant that runs
its turbines on a gigantic reservoir of unwept tears,
always on the verge of spilling over.

“i AM WHAT I AM.” Never has domination found
such an innocent-sounding slogan. The maintenance
of the self in a permanent state of deterioration, in
a chronic state of near- collapse, is the best- kept
secret of the present order of things. The weak,
depressed, self-critical, virtual self is essentially that
endlessly adaptable subject required by the ceaseless
innovation of production, the accelerated obsoles-
cence of technologies, the constant overturning of
social norms, and generalized flexibility. It is at the
same time the most voracious consumer and, para-
doxically, the most productive self, the one that will
most eagerly and energetically throw itself into the
slightest project, only to return later to its original
larval state.

“WHAT AM I,” then? Since childhood, I’ve been
involved with flows of milk, smells, stories, sounds,
emotions, nursery rhymes, substances, gestures,
ideas, impressions, gazes, songs, and foods. What am
I? Tied in every way to places, sufferings, ancestors,
friends, loves, events, languages, memories, to all
kinds of things that obviously are not me. Everything
that attaches me to the world, all the links that

First Circle / 31

consti tute me, all the forces that compose me don’t
form an identity, a thing displayable on cue, but a
singular, shared, living existence, from which
emerges — at certain times and places — that being
which says “I.” Our feeling of inconsistency is simply
the consequence of this foolish belief in the perma-
nence of the self and of the little care we give to
what makes us what we are.

It’s dizzying to see Reeboks “I AM WHAT I AM”
enthroned atop a Shanghai skyscraper. The West
everywhere rolls out its favorite Trojan horse: the
exasperating antimony between the self and the
world, the individual and the group, between attach-
ment and freedom. Freedom isn’t the act of shedding
our attachments, but the practical capacity to work
on them, to move around in their space, to form or
dissolve them. The family only exists as a family, that
is, as a hell, for those who’ve quit trying to alter its
debilitating mechanisms, or don’t know how to. The
freedom to uproot oneself has always been a phan-
tasmic freedom. We can’t rid ourselves of what binds
us without at the same time losing the very thing to
which our forces would be applied.

“I AM WHAT I AM,” then, is not simply a lie, a
simple advertising campaign, but a military cam-
paign, a war cry directed against everything that
exists betiveen beings, against everything that circu-
lates indistinctly, everything that invisibly links
them, everything that prevents complete desolation.

32 / Tire Coming Insurrection

against everything that makes us exist , and ensures
that the whole world doesn’t everywhere have the
look and feel of a highway, an amusement park or a
new town: pure boredom, passionless but well-
ordered, empty, frozen space, where nothing moves
apart from registered bodies, molecular automobiles,
and ideal commodities.

France wouldn’t be the land of anxiety pills that it’s
become, the paradise of anti-depressants, the Mecca
of neurosis, if it weren’t also the European champion
of hourly productivity. Sickness, fatigue, depression,
can be seen as the individual symptoms of what
needs to be cured. They contribute to the mainte-
nance of the existing order, to my docile adjustment
to idiotic norms, and to the modernization of my
crutches. They specify the selection of my oppor-
tune, compliant, and productive tendencies, as well
as those that must be gently discarded. “It’s never too
late to change, you know.” But taken as facts , my
failings can also lead to the dismantling of the
hypothesis of the self. They then become acts of
resistance in the current war. They become a rebellion
and a force against everything that conspires to
normalize us, to amputate us. The self is not some
thing within us that is in a state of crisis; it is the form
they mean to stamp upon us. They want to make our
self something sharply defined, separate, assessable
in terms of qualities, controllable, when in fact we

First Circle / 33

are creatures among creatures, singularities among
similars, living flesh weaving the flesh of the world.
Contrary to what has been repeated to us since
childhood, intelligence doesn’t mean knowing how
to adapt — or if that is a kind of intelligence, it’s the
intelligence of slaves. Our inadaptability, our fatigue,
are only problems from the standpoint of what aims
to subjugate us. They indicate rather a starting
point, a meeting point, for new complicities. They
reveal a landscape more damaged, but infinitely
more sharable than all the fantasy lands this society
maintains for its purposes.

We are not depressed; were on strike. For those
who refuse to manage themselves, “depression” is
not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a sidestep
towards a political disaffiliation. From then on
medication and the police are the only possible
forms of conciliation. This is why the present society
doesn’t hesitate to impose Ritalin on its overactive
children, or to strap people into lifelong depen-
dence on pharmaceuticals, and why it claims to be
able to detect “behavioral disorders” at age three.
Because everywhere the hypothesis of the self is
beginning to crack.

34 / The Coming Insurrection

Second Circle

“ENTERTAINMENT IS A VITAL NEED”

A government that declares a state of emergency
against fifteen-year-old kids. A country that takes
refuge in the arms of a football team. A cop in a
hospital bed, complaining about being the victim
of “assault.” A prefect issuing a decree against the
building of tree houses. Two ten year olds, in
Chelles, charged with burning down a video game
arcade. Our era excels in a certain situational absur-
dity that it never seems to recognize. The truth is
that the plaintive, indignant tones of the news media
are unable to stifle the burst of laughter that greets
these headlines.

A burst of laughter is the only appropriate
response to all the serious “questions” posed by news
analysts. To take the most banal: there is no “immi-
gration question.” Who still grows up where they
were born? Who lives where they grew up? Who
works where they live? Who lives where their ancestors
did? And to whom do the children of this era belong,
to television or their parents? The truth is that we
have been completely torn from any belonging, we
are no longer from anywhere, and the result, in

35

addition to a new disposition to tourism, is an
undeniable suffering. Our history is one of colo-
nizations, of migrations, of wars, of exiles, of the
destruction of all roots. It’s the story of everything
that has made us foreigners in this world, guests in
our own family. We have been expropriated from
our own language by education, from our songs by
reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornog-
raphy, from our city by the police, and from our
friends by wage-labor. To this we should add, in
France, the relentless, age-old work of individual-
ization by the power of the state, that classifies,
compares, disciplines and separates its subjects
starting from a very young age, that instinctively
grinds down any solidarities that escape it until
nothing remains except citizenship — a pure, phan-
tasmic sense of belonging to the Republic. The
Frenchman, more than anyone else, is the embodi-
ment of the dispossessed, the destitute. His hatred
of foreigners is of a piece with his hatred of himself as
a foreigner. The mixture of jealousy and fear he feels
toward the “cites”' expresses nothing but his resent-
ment for all he has lost. He can’t help envying these
so-called "problem” neighborhoods where there still
persists a bit of communal life, a few links between
beings, some solidarities not controlled by the state,
an informal economy, an organization that is not yet

1. A housing project, typically in impoverished areas like the banlieue. i.

36 / The Coming Insurrection

detached from those who organize themselves. We
have arrived at a point of privation where the only
way to feel French is to curse the immigrants and
those who are more visibly foreign. In this country, the
immigrants assume a curious position of sovereignty:
if they weren’t here, the French might stop existing.

France is a product of its schools, and not the
inverse. We live in an excessively scholastic country,
where one remembers taking the baccalaureat exam
as a defining moment. Where retired people still tell
you about their failure, forty years earlier, in such
and such an exam, and how it screwed up their
whole career, their whole life. For a century and a
half, the national school system has been producing
a type of state subjectivity that stands out among all
others. People who accept competition provided the
playing field is level. Who expect in life that each
person be rewarded as in a contest, according to
their merit. Who always ask permission before taking.
Who silently respect culture, the rules, and those
with the best grades. Even their attachment to their
great critical intellectuals and their rejection of
capitalism are stamped by this love of school. It’s
this construction of subjectivities by the state that is
breaking down, every day a little more, with the
decline of the scholarly institutions. The reappear-
ance, over the past twenty years, of a school and a
culture of the street, in competition with the school

Second Circle / 37

of the Republic and its cardboard culture, is the most
deepest trauma that French universalism is presently
undergoing. On this point, there is no disagreement
between the extreme right and the most virulent left.
The name Jules Ferry- — Minister of Thiers during the
crushing of the Commune and theoretician of colo-
nization — should be enough however to render this
institution suspect. 2

When we see teachers from some “citizens’ vigi-
lance committee” come on the evening news to
whine about their school being burned down, we
remember how many times, as children, we dreamed
of doing exactly this. When we hear a leftist intel-
lectual venting about the barbarism of groups of kids
harassing passersby in the street, shoplifting, burning
cars, and playing cat and mouse with riot police, we
remember what they said about the greasers in the
’50s or, better, the apaches in the “Belle Epoque”
“The generic name apaches ,” writes a judge at the
Seine tribunal in 1907, “has for the past few years
been a way of labeling all dangerous individuals,
enemies of society, without nation or family, deserters
of all duties, ready for the most audacious confronta-
tions, and for any sort of attack on persons and
properties.” These gangs who flee work, who adopt

2. The Ferry laws — founding France s secular and republican system
of education were named after Jules Ferry who initially proposed
them in 1881.

38/ The Coming Insuitection

the names of their neighborhoods, and confront the
police are the nightmare of the good, individualized
French citizen: they embody everything he has
renounced, all the possible joy he will never experi-
ence. There is something impertinent about existing
in a country where a child singing as she pleases is
inevitably silenced with a “Stop, you’re going to stir
things up,” where scholastic castration unleashes
floods of well-mannered employees. The aura that
persists around Mesrine 3 has less to do with his
uprightness and his audacity than with the fact that
he took it upon himself to enact vengeance on what
we should all avenge. Or rather, on what we should
avenge directly, when instead we continue to hesitate
and defer endlessly. Because there is no doubt that in
a thousand imperceptible and undercover ways, in all
sorts of slanderous remarks, in every spiteful little
expression and venomous politeness, the Frenchman
continues to avenge, permanently and against every-
one, the fact that he’s resigned himself to being
crushed. It was about time that Fuck the police\
replaced Yes sir, officer ! In this sense, the open hostility
of certain gangs only expresses, in a slightly less
muffled way, the poisonous atmosphere, the rotten
spirit, the desire for a salvational destruction by
which the country is consumed.

3. A legendary French outlaw, 1936—1979.

Second Circle / 39

To call this population of strangers in the midst of
which we live “society is such a usurpation that even
sociologists wonder if they should abandon a con-
cept that was, for a century, their bread and butter.
Now they prefer the metaphor of a network to
describe the connection of cybernetic solitudes, the
intermeshing of weak interactions under names like
“colleague,” “contact,” “buddy,” “acquaintance,” or
“date.” Such networks sometimes condense into a
milieu, where nothing is shared but codes, and
where nothing is played out except the incessant
recomposition of identity.

It would be a waste of time to detail all that is mori-
bund in existing social relations. They say the family
is coming back, the couple is coming back. But the
family that’s coming back is not the same one that
went away. Its return is nothing but a deepening of
the prevailing separation that it serves to mask,
becoming what it is through this masquerade.
Everyone can testify to the doses of sadness con-
densed from year to year in family gatherings, the
forced smiles, the awkwardness of seeing everyone
pretending in vain, the feeling that a corpse is lying
there on the table, and everyone acting as though it
were nothing. From flirtation to divorce, from
cohabitation to stepfamilies, everyone feels the inanity
of the sad family nucleus, but most seem to believe
that it would be sadder still to give it up. The family is

40 / The Coming Insurrection

no longer so much the suffocation of maternal con-
trol or the patriarchy of beatings as it is this infantile
abandon to a fuzzy dependency, where everything is
familiar, this carefree moment in the face of a world
that nobody can deny is breaking down, a world
where “becoming self-sufficient” is a euphemism for
“finding a boss.” They want to use the “familiarity’ of
the biological family as an excuse to undermine
anything that burns passionately within us and,
under the pretext that they raised us, make us
renounce the possibility of growing up, as well as
everything that is serious in childhood. We need to
guard against such corrosion.

The couple is like the final stage of the great
social debacle. It’s the oasis in the middle of the
human desert. Under the auspices of “intimacy,”
we come to it looking for everything that has so
obviously deserted contemporary social relations:
warmth, simplicity, truth, a life without theater or
spectator. But once the romantic enchantment has
passed, “intimacy’ strips itself bare: it is itself a
social invention, it speaks the language of glamour
magazines and psychology; like everything else, it
is bolstered with strategies to the point of nausea.
There is no more truth here than elsewhere; here too
lies and the laws of estrangement dominate. And
when, by good fortune, one discovers this truth, it
demands a sharing that belies the very form of the
couple. What allows beings to love each other is also

Second Circle/ 41

what makes them lovable, and ruins the utopia of
autism-for-two.

In reality, the decomposition of all social forms is
a blessing. It is for us the ideal condition for a wild,
massive experimentation with new arrangements,
new fidelities. The famous “parental resignation” has
imposed on us a confrontation with the world that
demands a precocious lucidity, and foreshadows lovely
revolts to come. In the death of the couple, we see the
birth of troubling forms of collective affectivity, now
that sex is all used up and masculinity and femininity
parade around in such moth-eaten clothes, now that
three decades of non-stop pornographic innovation
have exhausted all the allure of transgression and
liberation. We count on making that which is
unconditional in relationships the armor of a political
solidarity as impenetrable to state interference as a
gypsy camp. There is no reason that the inter-
minable subsidies that numerous relatives are
compelled to offload onto their proletarianized
progeny can’t become a form of patronage in favor of
social subversion. “Becoming autonomous,” could
just as easily mean learning to fight in the street, to
occupy empty houses, to cease working, to love each
other madly, and to shoplift.

42 / The Coming Insurrection

Third Circle

"LIFE, HEALTH AND LOVE ARE PRECARIOUS-
WHY SHOULD WORK BE AN EXCEPTION?”

No question is more confused, in France, than the
question of work. No relation is more disfigured than
the one between the French and work. Go to
Andalusia, to Algeria, to Naples. They despise work,
profoundly. Go to Germany, to the United States, to
Japan. They revere work. Things are changing, it’s true.
There are plenty of otaku in Japan , fiohe Arbeitslose in
Germany and workaholics in Andalusia. But for the
time being these are only curiosities. In France, we get
down on all fours to climb the ladders of hierarchy, but
privately flatter ourselves that we don’t really give a
shit. We stay at work until ten o’clock in the evening
when we’re swamped, but we’ve never had any scruples
aboutstealing office supplies here and there, or carting
off the inventory in order to resell it later. We hate
bosses, but we want to be employed at any cost. To
have a job is an honor, yet working is a sign of servility.
In short: the perfect clinical illustration of hysteria.
We love while hating, we hate while loving. And we
all know the stupor and confusion that strike the
hysteric when he loses his victim — his master. More
often than not, he doesn’t get over it.

43

This neurosis is the basis on which successive
governments could declare war on joblessness,
claiming to wage an “employment battle” while ex-
managers camped with their cell phones in Red
Cross shelters along the banks of the Seine. While
the Department of Labor was massively manipulating
its statistics in order to bring unemployment num-
bers below two million. While welfare checks and
drug dealing were the only guarantees, as the French
state has recognized, against the possibility of a
social explosion at any moment. It’s the psychic
economy of the French as much as the political
stability of the country that is at stake in the main-
tenance of the workerist fiction.

Excuse us if we don’t give a fuck.

We belong to a generation that lives very well in
this fiction. That has never counted on either a pen-
sion or the right to work, let alone rights at work.
That isn’t even “precarious,” as the most advanced
factions of the militant left like to theorize, because
to be precarious is still to define oneself in relation to
the sphere of work, that is, to its decomposition. We
accept the necessity of finding money, by whatever
means, because it is currently impossible to do with-
out it, but we reject the necessity of working. Besides,
we don’t work anymore: we do our time. Business is
not a place where we exist, it’s a place we pass
through. We aren’t cynical, we are just unwilling to
be deceived. All these discourses on motivation,

44 / The Coming Insurreclbn

quality and personal investment pass us by, to the
great dismay of personnel managers. They say we are
disappointed by business, that it failed to honor our
parents’ loyalty, that it let them go too quickly. They
are lying. To be disappointed, one must have hoped
for something. And we have never hoped for any-
thing from business: we see it for what it is and for
what it has always been, a fool’s game of varying
degrees of comfort. With regard to our parents, our
only regret is that they fell into the trap, at least the
ones who believed.

The sentimental confusion that surrounds the ques-
tion of work can be explained thus: the notion of
work has always included two contradictory dimen-
sions-. a dimension of exploitation and a dimension
of participation. Exploitation of individual and
collective labor power through the private or social
appropriation of surplus value; participation in a
common effort through the relations linking
those who cooperate in the universe of produc-
tion. These two dimensions are perversely confused
in the notion of work, which explains workers’
indifference, at the end of the day, to both Marxist
rhetoric — which denies the dimension of participa-
tion — and managerial rhetoric — which denies the
dimension of exploitation. Hence the ambivalence
of the relation of work, which is shameful insofar as
it makes us strangers to what we are doing, and — at

Third Circle / 45

the same time — adored, insofar as a part of our-
selves is brought into play. The disaster has already
occurred: it resides in everything that had to be
destroyed, in all those who had to be uprooted, in
order for work toendupas the only way of existing.
The horror of work is less in the work itself than in
the methodical ravaging, for centuries, of all that
isn’t work: the familiarities of one’s neighborhood
and trade, of one’s village, of struggle, of kinship,
our attachment to places, to beings, to the seasons,
to ways of doing and speaking.

Here lies the present paradox: work has totally
triumphed over all other ways of existing, as the same
time as workers have become superfluous. Gains in
productivity, outsourcing, mechanization, automated
and digital production have so progressed that they
have almost reduced to zero the quantity of living
labor necessary in the manufacture of any product.
We are living the paradox of a society of workers
without work, where entertainment, consumption
and leisure only underscore the lack from which they
are supposed to distract us. The mine at Carmaux,
famous for a century of violent strikes, has now been
converted into Cape Discovery. It’s an entertainment
“multiplex” for skateboarding and biking, distin-
guished by a “Mining Museum’ in which methane
blasts are simulated for vacationers.

In corporations, work is divided in an increasingly
visible way into highly skilled positions of research,

46 / The Coming Insurrection

conception, control, coordination and communica-
tion which deploy all the knowledge necessary for
the new, cybernetic production process, and
unskilled positions for the maintenance and moni-
tering of this process. The first are few in number,
very well paid and thus so coveted that the minority
who occupy these positions will do anything to
avoid losing them. They and their work are effec-
tively bound in one anxious embrace. Managers,
scientists, lobbyists, researchers, programmers,
developers, consultants and engineers, literally never
stop working. Even their sex lives serve to augment
productivity. A Human Resources philosopher
writes, " [t]he most creative businesses are the ones
with the greatest number of intimate relations.”
“Business associates,” a Daimler-Benz Human
Resources Manager confirms, “are an important part
of the business’s capital [...] Their motivation, their
know-how, their capacity to innovate and their
attention to clients’ desires constitute the raw mate-
rial of innovative services [...] Their behavior, their
social and emotional competence, are a growing
factor in the evaluation of their work [. . .] This will
no longer be evaluated in terms of number of hours
on the job, but on the basis of objectives attained
and quality of results. They are entrepreneurs.”

The series of tasks that can’t be delegated to
automation form a nebulous cluster of positions that,
because they cannot be occupied by machines, are

Third Circle / 47

occupied by any old human — warehousemen, stock
people, assembly line workers, seasonal workers, etc.
This flexible, undifferentiated workforce that moves
from one task to the next and never stays long in a
business can no longer even consolidate itself as a
force, being outside the center of the production
process and employed to plug the holes of what has
not yet been mechanized, as if pulverized in a multi-
tude of interstices. The temp is the figure of the
worker who is no longer a worker, who no longer has
a trade — but only abilities that he sells where he can—
and whose veiy availability is also a kind of work.

On the margins of this workforce that is effective
and necessary for the functioning of the machine, is
a growing majority that has become superfluous,
that is certainly useful to the flow of production but
not much else, which introduces the risk that, in its
idleness, it will set about sabotaging the machine.
The menace of a general demobilization is the
specter that haunts the present system of produc-
tion. Not everybody responds to the question "Why
work?” in the same way as this ex-welfare recipient:
"For my well-being. I have to keep myself busy.”
There is a serious risk that we will end up finding a
good use for our very idleness. This floating population
must somehow be kept occupied. But to this day
they have not found a better disciplinary method
than wages. It’s therefore necessary to pursue the

48 / The Coming Insurrection

dismantling of "social gains” so that the most rest-
less ones, those who will only surrender when faced
with the alternative of dying of hunger or stagnating
in jail, are lured back to the bosom of wage-labor.
The burgeoning slave trade in "personal services”
must continue: cleaning, catering, massage, domestic
nursing, prostitution, tutoring, therapy, psycholog-
ical aid, etc. This is accompanied by a continual
raising of the standards of security, hygiene, control,
and culture, and by an accelerated recycling of fashions,
all of which establish the need for such services. In
Rouen, we now have "human parking meters:” peo-
ple who wait around on the street and deliver you
your parking slip, and, if it’s raining, will even rent
you an umbrella.

The order of work was the order of a world. The evi-
dence of its ruin is paralyzing to those who dread
what will come after. Today work is tied less to the
economic necessity of producing goods than to the
political necessity of producing producers and con-
sumers, and of preserving by any means necessary the
order of work. Producing oneself is becoming the
dominant occupation of a society where production
no longer has an object: like a carpenter who’s been
evicted from his shop and in desperation sets about
hammering and sawing himself. All these young
people smiling for their job interviews, who have
their teeth whitened to give them an edge, who go to

Third Circle / 49

nightclubs to boost their company spirit, who learn
English to advance their careers, who get divorced or
married to move up the ladder, who take courses in
leadership or practice “self-improvement” in order to
better “manage conflicts” — “the most intimate ‘self-
improvement’,” says one guru, “will lead to increased
emotional stability, to smoother and more open rela-
tionships, to sharper intellectual focus, and therefore
to a better economic performance.” This swarming
little crowd that waits impatiently to be hired while
doing whatever it can to seem natural is the result of
an attempt to rescue the order of work through an
ethos of mobility. To be mobilized is to relate to work
not as an activity but as a possibility. If the unem-
ployed person removes his piercings, goes to the
barber and keeps himself busy with “projects,” if he
really works on his “employability,” as they say, it’s
because this is how he demonstrates his mobility.
Mobility is this slight detachment from the self, this
minimal disconnection from what constitutes us, this
condition of strangeness whereby the self can now be
taken up as an object of work, and it now becomes
possible to sell oneself rather than one’s labor power,
to be remunerated not for what one does but for
what one is, for our exquisite mastery of social codes,
for our relational talents, for our smile and our way of
presenting ourselves. This is the new standard of
socialization. Mobility brings about a fusion of the
two contradictory poles of work: here we participate

50 / The Conning Insurreciion

in our own exploitation, and all participation is
exploited. Ideally, you are yourself a little business,
your own boss, your own product. Whether one is
working or not, it’s a question of generating contacts,
abilities, networking, in short: “human capital.” The
planetary injunction to mobilize at the slightest
pretext — cancer, “terrorism,” an earthquake, the
homeless — sums up the reigning powers’ determina-
tion to maintain the reign of work beyond its physical
disappearance.

The present production apparatus is therefore, on
the one hand, a gigantic machine for psychic and
physical mobilization, for sucking the energy of
humans that have become superfluous, and, on the
other hand, a sorting machine that allocates survival
to conpliant subjectivities and rejects all “problem
individuals,” all those who embody another use of life
and, in this way, resist the machine. On the one
hand, ghosts are brought to life, and on the other, the
living are left to die. This is the properly political
function of the contemporary production apparatus.

To organize beyond and against work, to collectively
desert the regime of mobility, to demonstrate the
existence of a vitality and a discipline precisely in
demobilization is a crime for which a civilization on
its luiees is not about to forgive us. In fact, though,
it’s the only way to survive it.

Third Circle / 51

Fourth Circle

"MORE SIMPLE, MORE FUN, MORE MOBILE,
MORE SECURE!"

We’ve heard enough about the “city” and the “coun-
try,” and particularly about the supposed ancient
opposition between the two. From up close or from
afar, what surrounds us looks nothing like that: it is
one single urban cloth, without form or order, a
bleak zone, endless and undefined, a global continuum
of museum-like hypercenters and natural parks, of
enormous suburban housing developments and
massive agricultural projects, industrial zones and
subdivisions, country inns and trendy bars: the
metropolis. Certainly the ancient city existed, as did
the cities of medieval and modern times. But there is
no such thing as a metropolitan city. All territory is
subsumed by the metropolis. Everything occupies
the same space, if not geographically then through
the intermeshing of its networks.

It’s because the city has finally disappeared that it
has now become fetishized, as history. The factory
buildings of Lille become concert halls. The rebuilt
concrete core of Le Havre is now a UNESCO World
Heritage sire. In Beijing, the hutongs surrounding
the Forbidden City were demolished, replaced by

52

fake versions, placed a little farther out, on display for
sightseers. In Troyes they paste half-timber facades
onto cinderblock buildings, a type of pastiche that
resembles the Victorian shops at Disneyland Paris
more than anything else. The old historic centers,
once hotbeds of revolutionary sedition, are now
wisely integrated into the organizational diagram of
the metropolis. They’ve been given over to tourism
and conspicuous consumption. They are the fairy-
tale commodity islands, propped up by their expos
and decorations, and by force if necessary. The
oppressive sentimentality of every “Christmas Village”
is offset by ever more security guards and city
patrols. Control has a wonderful way of integrating
itself into the commodity landscape, showing its
authoritarian face to anyone who wants to see it.
It’s an age of fusions, of muzak, telescoping police
batons and cotton candy. Equal parts police surveil-
lance and enchantment!

This taste for the “authentic,” and for the control
that goes with it, accompanies the petty bourgeoisie
in its colonization of working class neighborhoods.
Pushed out of the city centers, they find on the
frontiers the kind of “neighborhood feeling” they
missed in the prefab houses of suburbia. By chasing
out the poor people, the cars, and the immigrants, by
making it tidy, by getting rid of all the germs, the
petty bourgeoisie wipes out the very thing it came
looking for. A police officer and a garbage man

Fourth Circle / 53

shake hands in a picture on a town billboard, and
the slogan reads: “Montauban — Clean City.”

The same sense of decency that obliges urbanists
to stop speaking of the “city’ (which they destroyed)
and instead to talk of the “urban,” should compel
them also to drop “country” (since it no longer
exists). The uprooted and stressed-out masses are
instead shown a countryside, a vision of the past
that’s easy to stage now that the country folk have
been so depleted. It is a marketing campaign
deployed on a “territory” in which everything must
be valorized or reconstituted as national heritage.
Everywhere it’s the same chilling void, reaching into
even the most remote and rustic corners.

The metropolis is this simultaneous death of city
and country. It is the crossroads where all the petty
bourgeois come together, in the middle of this
middle class that stretches out indefinitely, as much
a result of rural flight as of urban sprawl. To cover
the planet with glass would fit perfectly the cynicism
of contemporary architecture. A school, a hospital,
or a media center are all variations on the same
theme: transparency, neutrality, uniformity. These
massive, fluid buildings are conceived without any
need to know what they will house. They could be
here as much as anywhere else. What to do with all
the office towers at La Defense in Paris, the apart-
ment blocks of Lyon’s La Part Dieu, or the shopping
complexes of EuraLille? The expression "flambant

54 / The Coming Insurrection

neuf ” l perfectly captures their destiny. A Scottish
traveler testifies to the unique attraction of the
power of fire, speaking after rebels had burned the
H6tel de Ville in Paris in May, 1871: “Never could I
have imagined anything so beautiful. It’s superb. I
won’t deny that the people of the Commune are
frightful rogues. But what artists! And they were not
even aware of their own masterpiece! [...] I have
seen the ruins of Amalfi bathed in the azure swells of
the Mediterranean, and the ruins of the Tung-hoor
temples in Punjab. I’ve seen Rome and many other
things. But nothing can compare to what I feasted
my eyes on tonight.”

There still remain some fragments of the city and
some traces of the country caught up in the metro-
politan mesh. But vitality has taken up quarters in
the so-called “problem” neighborhoods. It’s a paradox
that the places thought to be the most uninhabitable
turn out to be the only ones still in some way
inhabited. An old squatted shack still feels more
lived in than the so-called luxury apartments where
it is only possible to set down the furniture and get
the decor just right while waiting for the next
move. Within many of today’s megalopolises, the
shantytowns are the last living and livable areas, and

1. “ flambant neuf - — literally, “flaming new” — is the Flench equivalent
of the English “brand new.”

Fourth Circle I 55

also, of course, the most deadly. They are the flip-
side of the electronic decor of the global metropolis.
The dormitory towers in the suburbs north of Paris,
abandoned by a petty bourgeoisie that went off
hunting for swimming pools, have been brought
back to life by mass unemployment and now radiate
more energy than the Latin Quarter. In words as
much as fire.

The conflagration of November 2005 was not a
result of extreme dispossession, as it is often por-
trayed. It was, on the contrary, a complete possession
of a territory. People can burn cars because they are
pissed off, but to keep the riots going for a month,
while keeping the police in check — to do that you
have to know how to organize, you have to establish
complicities, you have to know the terrain perfectly,
and share a common language and a common
enemy. Mile after mile and week after week, the fire
spread. New blazes responded to the original ones,
appearing where they were least expected. The
grapevine can’t be wiretapped.

The metropolis is a terrain of constant low-intensity
conflict, in which the taking of Basra, Mogadishu, or
Nablus mark points of culmination. For a long time,
the city was a place for the military to avoid, or if
anything, to besiege; but the metropolis is perfectly
compatible with war. Armed conflict is only a
moment in its constant reconfiguration. The battles

56/ The Coming Insurrection

conducted by the great powers resemble a kind of
never-ending police campaign in the black holes of
the metropolis, "whether in Burkina Faso, in the
South Bronx, in Kamagasaki, in Chiapas, or in La
Courneuve.” No longer undertaken in view of victory
or peace, or even the re-establishment of order, such
“interventions” continue a security operation that is
always already in progress. War is no longer a distinct
event in time, but instead diffracts into a series of
micro-operations, by both military and police, to
ensure security.

The police and the army are evolving in parallel
and in lock-step. A criminologist requests that the
national riot police reorganize itself into small, pro-
fessionalized, mobile units. The military academy,
cradle of disciplinary methods, is rethinking its own
hierarchical organization. For his infantry battalion
a NATO officer employs a “participatory method
that involves everyone in the analysis, preparation,
execution, and evaluation of an action. The plan is
considered and reconsidered for days, right through
the training phase and according to the latest intel-
ligence [...] There is nothing like group planning
for building team cohesion and morale.”

The armed forces don’t simply adapt themselves
to the metropolis, they produce it. Thus, since the
battle of Nablus, Israeli soldiers have become interior
designers. Forced by Palestinian guerrillas to aban-
don the streets, which had become too dangerous,

Fourth Circle / 57

they learned to advance vertically and horizontally
into the heart of the urban architecture, poking
holes in walls and ceilings in order to move
through them. An officer in the Israel Defense
Forces, and a graduate in philosophy, explains: "the
enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical
manner, and I do not want to obey this interpreta-
tion and fall into his traps. [...] I want to surprise
him! This is the essence of war. I need to win [...]
This is why we opted for the methodology of moving
through walls [...] Like a worm that eats its way
forward.” Urban space is more than just the theater
of confrontation, it is also the means. This echoes
the advice of Blanqui who recommended (in this
case for the party of insurrection) that the future
insurgents of Paris take over the houses on the bar-
ricaded streets to protect their positions, that they
should bore holes in the walls to allow passage
between houses, break down the ground floor stair-
wells and poke holes in the ceilings to defend
themselves against potential attackers, rip out the
doors and use them to barricade the windows, and
turn each floor into a gun turret.

The metropolis is not just this urban pile-up, this
final collision between city and country. It is also a
flow of beings and things, a current that runs through
fiber-optic networks, through high-speed train lines,
satellites, and video surveillance cameras, making

58 / The Coming Insurrection

sure that this world keeps running straight to its ruin.
It is a current that would like to drag everything
along in its hopeless mobility, to mobilize each and
every one of us. Where information pummels us like
some kind of hostile force. Where the only thing left
to do is run. Where it becomes hard to wait, even for
the umpteenth subway train.

With the proliferation of means of movement
and communication, and with the lure of always
being elsewhere, we are continuously torn from the
here and now. Hop on an intercity or commuter
train, pick up a telephone — in order to be already
gone. Such mobility only ever means uprootedness,
isolation, exile. It would be insufferable if it weren’t
always the mobility of a private space , of a portable
interior. The private bubble doesn’t burst, it floats
around. The process of cocooning is not going
away, it is merely being put into motion. From a
train station, to an office park, to a commercial
bank, from one hotel to another, there is everywhere
a foreignness, a feeling so banal and so habitual it
becomes the last form of familiarity. Metropolitan
excess is this capricious mixing of definite moods,
indefinitely recombined. The city centers of the
metropolis are not clones of themselves, but offer
instead their own auras; we glide from one to the
next, selecting this one and rejecting that one, to
the tune of a kind of existential shopping trip
among different styles of bars, people, designs, or

Fourth Circle / 59

playlists. “With my mp3 player, Tm the master of
my world.” To cope with the uniformity that sur-
rounds us, our only option is to constantly renovate
our own interior world, like a child who constructs
the same little house over and over again, or like
Robinson Crusoe reproducing his shopkeepers
universe on a desert island — yet our desert island
is civilization itself) and there are billions of us
continually washing up on it.

It is precisely due to this architect uns of flows that
the metropolis is one of the most vulnerable human
arrangements that has ever existed. Supple, subtle,
but vulnerable. A brutal shutting down of borders to
fend off a raging epidemic, a sudden interruption of
supply lines, organized blockades of the axes of
communication — and the whole facade crumbles,
a facade that can no longer mask the scenes of
carnage haunting it from morning to night. The
world would not be moving so fast if it didn’t have
toconstantly outrun its own collapse.

The metropolis aims to shelter itself from
inevitable malfunction via its network structure, via
its entire technological infrastructure of nodes and
connections, its decentralized architecture. The
internet is said to be capable of surviving a nuclear
attack. Permanent control of the flow of informa-
tion, people and products makes the mobility of the
metropolis secure, while its’ tracking systems ensure
that no shipping containers get lost, that not a single

SO / The Coring Insirredion

dollar is stolen in any transaction, and that no ter-
lorist ends up on an airplane. Thanks to an RFID
chip, a biometric passport, a DNA profile.

But the metropolis also produces the means of its
own destruction. An American security expert
explains the deieat in Iraq as a result of the guerrillas'
ability to take advantage of new ways of communi-
cating. The US invasion didn’t so much import
democracy to Iraq as it did cybernetic networks.
They broughtwith them one of the weapons of their
own defeat The proliferation of mobile phones and
internet access points gave the guerrillas newfound
ways to self-organize, and allowed them to become
such elusive targets.

Every network has its weak points, the nodes that
must be undone in oiderto interrupt circulation, to
unwind die web. The last great European electrical
blackout proved it: a single incident with a high-
voltage wire and a good part of the continent was
plunged into darkness. In order for something to rise
up in the midst of the metropolis and open up other
possibilities, the first act must be to interrupt its
perpetuvm mobile. That is what the Thai rebels
understood when they knocked out electrical sta-
tions. That is what the French anti-CPE 1 protestors

2. A 2006 movanenr in Fiance, principally of university and high
school students, against a new employment law {CaBrM Jxrm&Tt
onhmdt CPE) penniainglsssauie job contracts (hr young people

Foutri C 3 rcte/ 61

understood in 2006 when they shut down the uni-
versities with a view toward shutting down the entire
economy. That is what the American longshoremen
understood when they struck in October 2002 in
support of three hundred jobs, blocking the main
ports on the West Coast for ten days. The American
economy is so dependent on goods coming from
Asia that the cost of the blockade was over a billion
dollars per day. With ten thousand people, the
largest economic power in the world can be brought
to its knees. According to certain “experts,” if the
action had lasted another month, it would have
produced “a recession in the United States and an
economic nightmare in Southeast Asia.”

62 / Tiie Coming Insurrection

Fifth Circle

“FEWER POSSESSIONS, MORE CONNECTIONS!"

Thirty years of “crisis,” mass unemployment and
flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the
economy. Thirty years punctuated, it is true, by delu-
sionary interludes: the interlude of 1981-83, when we
were deluded into thinking a government of the left
might make people better off; the “easy money ? inter-
lude of 1986-89, when we were all supposed to be
playing the market and getting rich; the internet inter-
lude of 1998-2001, when everyone was going to get a
virtual career through being well-connected, when a
diverse but united France, cultured and multicultural,
would bring home every World Cup. But here we are,
we’ve drained our supply of delusions, we’ve hit rock
bottom and are totally broke, or buried in debt.

We have to see that the economy is not “in” crisis,
the economy is itself the crisis. It’s not that there’s not
enough work, it’s that there is too much of it. All things
considered, it’s not the crisis that depresses us, it’s
growth. We must admit that the litany of stock
market prices moves us about as much as a Latin
mass. Luckily for us, there are quite a few of us who
have come to this conclusion. We’re not talking about

63

those who live off various scams, who deal in this or
that, or who have been on welfare for the last ten
years. Or of all those who no longer find their identity
in their jobs and live for their time off. Nor are we
talking about those who’ve been swept under the rug,
the hidden ones who make do with the least, and yet
outnumber the rest. All those struck by this strange
mass detachment, adding to the ranks of retirees and
the cynically overexploited flexible labor force. We’re
not talking about them, although they too should, in
one way or another, arrive at a similar conclusion.

We are talking about all of the countries, indeed
entire continents, that have lost faith in the economy,
either because they’ve seen the IMF come and go
amid crashes and enormous losses, or because they’ve
gotten a taste of the World Bank. The soft crisis of
vocation that the West is now experiencing is com-
pletely absent in these places. What is happening in
Guinea, Russia, Argentina and Bolivia is a violent
and long-lasting debunking of this religion and its
clergy. “What do you call a thousand IMF econo-
mists lying at the bottom of the sea?” went the joke
at the World Bank — “a good start.” A Russian joke:
“Two economists meet. One asks the other: ‘You
understand what’s happening?’ The other responds:
‘Wait, I’ll explain it to you.’ ‘No, no,’ says the first,
‘explaining is no problem, I’m an economist, too.
What fm asking is: do you understand it?” Entire
sections of this clergy pretend to be dissidents and to

64 / The Coming Insurrection

critique this religions dogma. The latest attempt to
revive the so-called “science of the economy’ — a
current that straight-facedly refers to itself as “post
autistic economics” — makes a living from disman-
tling the usurpations, sleights of hand and cooked
books of a science whose only tangible function is to
rattle the monstrance during the vociferations of the
chiefs, giving their demands for submission a bit of
ceremony, and ultimately doing what religions have
always done: providing explanations. For the general
misery becomes intolerable the moment it is shown
for what it is, a thing without cause or reason.

Nobody respects money anymore, neither those who
have it nor those who don’t. When asked what they
want to be some day, twenty percent of young
Germans answer “artist.” Workis no longer endured
as a given of the human condition. The accounting
departments of corporations confess that they have
no idea where value comes from. The market’s bad
reputation would have done it in a decade ago if not
for the bluster and fury, not to mention the deep
pockets, of its apologists. It is common sense now to
see progress as synonymous with disaster. In the world
of the economic, everything is in flight, just like in
the USSR under Andropov . 1 Anyone who has spent

1. Andropov was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union from 1982 to 1984.

Fifth Circle / 65

a little time analyzing the final years of the USSR
knows very well that the pleas for goodwill coming
from our rulers, all of their fantasies about some
future that has disappeared without a trace, all of
their professions of faith in “reforming” this and that,
are just the first fissures in the structure of the wall.
The collapse of the socialist bloc was in no way a
victory of capitalism; it was merely the breakdown of
one of the forms capitalism takes. Besides, the demise
of the USSR did not come about because a people
revolted, but because the nomenklatura was under-
going a changeover. When it proclaimed the end of
socialism, a small fraction of the ruling class emanci-
pated itself from the anachronistic duties that still
bound it to the people. It took private control of
what it already controlled in the name of “everyone.”
In the factories, the joke went; “We pretend to work,
and they pretend to pay us.” The oligarchy replied,
“There’s no point, let’s stop pretending!” They ended
up with the raw materials, industrial infrastructures,
the military-industrial complex, the banks and the
nightclubs. Everyone else got poverty or emigration.
Just as no one in Andropov’s time believed in the
USSR, no one in the meeting halls, workshops and
offices believes in France today. “There’s no point,”
respond the bosses and political leaders, who no
longer even bother to smooth the edges of the “iron
laws of the economy.” They strip factories in the
middle of the night and announce the shutdown

66 / The Coming Insurrection

early next morning. They no longer hesitate to send in
anti-terrorism units to shut down a strike, as was done
with the ferries and the occupied recycling center in
Rennes. The brutal activity of power today consists
both in administering this ruin while at the same time
establishing the framework for a “new economy.

And yet we had gotten used to the economy. For gen-
erations we were disciplined, pacified and made into
subjects , productive by nature and content to con-
sume. And suddenly everything that we were deter-
mined to forget is revealed: that the economy is polit-
ical. And that this politics is, today, a politics of
selection within a humanity that has, largely become
superfluous. From Colbert 2 to de Gaulle, by way of
Napoleon III, the state has always treated the eco-
nomic as political, as have the bourgeoisie (who prof-
it from it) and the proletariat (who confront it). All
that’s left is this strange, middling part of the popula-
tion, the curious and powerless aggregate of those who
take no sides: the petty bourgeoisie. They have
always pretended to believe in the economy as a
reality — because their neutrality is safe there. Small
business owners, small bosses, minor bureaucrats,
managers, professors, journalists, middlemen of
every sort make up this non-class in France, this

2. Jean-Baptiste Colbert served as the French minister of finance from
1665 to 1683 under Louis XIV.

Fifth Circle ,'67

social gelatin composed of the mass of all those who
just want to live their little private lives at a distance
from history and its tumults. This swamp is predis-
posed to be the champion of false consciousness, half-
asleep and always ready to close its eyes on the war
that rages all around it. Each clarification of a front in
this war is thus accompanied in France by the inven-
tion of some new fad. For the past ten years, it was
ATT AC 3 and its improbable Tobin tax — a tax whose
implementation would require nothing less than a
global government — with its sympathy for the “real
economy’’ as opposed to the financial markets, not to
mention its touching nostalgia for the state. The
comedy lasts only so long before turning into a mas-
querade. And then another fad replaces it. So now we
have “negative growth.”' 1 Whereas ATT AC tried to
save economics as a science with its popular educa-
tion courses, negative growth would preserve it as a
morality. There is only one alternative to the coming
apocalypse: reduce growth. Consume and produce

3. Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of
Citizens (ATTAC) is a non party political organization that advocates
social democratic reforms, particularly the “Tobin tax” on interna-
tional foreign exchange intended to curtail currency speculation and
fond social policies.

4. La dtcroissance ( negative growth) is a French left -ecological movement
which advocates a reduction in consumption and production f or the sake
of environmentalsustainability and an improvement in the quality of life.

68 / The Coming Insurrection

less. Become joyously frugal. Eat organic, ride your
bike, stop smoking, and pay close attention to the
products you buy. Be content with what’s strictly nec-
essary. Voluntary simplicity. "Rediscover true wealth
in the blossoming of convivial social relations in a
healthy world.” "Don’t use up our natural capital.”
Work toward a "healthy economy.” "No regulation
through chaos.” “Avoid a social crisis that would
threaten democracy and humanism.” Simply put:
become economical. Go back to daddy’s economy, to
the golden age of the petty bourgeoisie: the ’50s.
"When an individual is frugal, property serves its
function perfectly, which is to allow the individual
to enjoy his or her own life sheltered from public
existence, in the private sanctuary of his or her life.”

A graphic designer wearing a handmade sweater is
drinking a fruity cocktail with some friends on the
terrace of an "ethnic” cafA They’re chatty and cor-
dial, they joke around a bit, they make sure not to
be too loud or too quiet, they smile at each other, a
little blissfully: we are so civilized. Afterwards, some
of them will go work in the neighborhood commu-
nity garden, while others will dabble in pottery,
some Zen Buddhism, or in the making of an ani-
mated film. They find communion in the smug
feeling that they constitute a new humanity, wiser
and more refined than the previous one. And they
are right. There is a curious agreement between

Filth Circle / 69

Apple and the negative growth movement about the
civilization of the future. Some people’s idea of
returning to the economy of yesteryear offers others
the convenient screen behind which a great techno-
logical leap forward can be launched. For in history
there is no going back. Any exhortation to return to
the past is only the expression of one form of con-
sciousness of the present, and rarely the least modern.

It is not by chance that negative growth is the banner
of the dissident advertisers of the magazine Casseurs
de Pub? The inventors of zero growth — the Club of
Rome in 1972 — were themselves a group of indus-
trialists and bureaucrats who relied on a research
paper written by cyberneticians at MIT.

This convergence is hardly a coincidence. It is
part of the forced march towards a modernized
economy. Capitalism got as much as it could from
undoing all the old social ties, and it is now in the
process of remaking itself by rebuilding these same
ties on its own terms. Contemporary metropolitan
social life is its incubator. In the same way, it ravaged
the natural world and is now taken with the crazy
notion of reconstituting nature as so many con-
trolled environments, furnished with all the
necessary sensors. This new humanity requires a
new economy that would no longer be a separate
sphere of existence but, rather, its very tissue, the raw

5. A French equivalent of the magazine Adbusters.

70 / The Coming Insurrection

material of human relations. It requires a new defin-
ition of work as work on oneself, a new definition of
capital as human capital, a new idea of production as
the production of relations, and consumption as the
consumption of situations; and above all a new idea
of value that would encompass all of the qualities of
beings. This burgeoning “bioeconomy’ conceives
the planet as a closed system to be managed and claims
to establish the foundations for a science that would
integrate all the parameters of life. Such a science
could make us miss the good old days when unreli-
able indices like GDP growth were supposed to
measure the well-being of a people, but at least no
one believed in them.

“Revalorize the non-economic aspects of life” is
the slogan shared by the negative growth movement
and by capital’s reform program. Eco-villages, video-
surveillance cameras, spirituality, biotechnologies
and sociability all belong to the same “civilizational
paradigm” now taking shape, that of a total economy
rebuilt from the ground up. Its intellectual matrix
is none other than cybernetics, the science of sys-
tems — that is, the science of their control. In the
17th century, in order to impose the economic sys-
tem and its ethos of work and greed in a definitive
way, it was necessary to confine and eliminate the
whole seamy mass of layabouts, liars, witches, mad-
men, scoundrels and all the other vagrant poor, a
whole humanity whose very existence gave the lie to

Fifth Crete / 71

the order of interest and restraint. The new economy
cannot be established without a similar selection of
subjects and zones singled out for transformation.
The chaos that we constantly hear about will either
provide the opportunity for this selection, or for our
victory over this odious project.

72 / The Coming Insurrection

Sixth Circle

“THE ENVIRONMENT IS AN
INDUSTRIAL CHALLENGE”

Ecology is the discovery of the decade. For the last
thirty years we’ve left it up to the environmentalists,
joking about it on Sunday so that we can act con-
cerned again on Monday. And now it’s caught up to
us, invading the airwaves like a hit song in summer-
time, because it’s 68 degrees in December.

One quarter of the fish species have disappeared
from the ocean. The rest won’t last much longer.

Bird flu alert: we are given assurances that hun-
dreds of thousands of migrating birds will be shot
from the sky.

Mercury levels in human breast milk are ten
times higher than the legal level for cows. And these
lips which swell up after I bite the apple — but it
came from the farmer’s market. The simplest ges-
tures have become toxic. One dies at the age of 35
from “a prolonged illness” that’s to be managed just
like one manages everything else. We should’ve seen
it coming before we got to this place, to ward B of
the palliative care center.

We have to admit it: this whole “catastrophe,”
which they so noisily inform us about, doesn’t really

73

touch us. At least not until we are hit by one of its
foreseeable consequences. It may concern us, but it
doesn’t touch us. And that is the real catastrophe.

There is no "environmental catastrophe.” The
catastrophe is the environment itself. The environment
is what’s left to man after he’s lost everything. Those
who live in a neighborhood, a street, a valley, a war
zone, a workshop- — they don’t have an “environment;”
they move through a world peopled by presences,
dangers, friends, enemies, moments of life and death,
all kinds of beings. Such a world has its own consis-
tency, which varies according to the intensity and
quality of the ties attaching us to all of these beings, to
all of these places. It’s only we, the children of the final
dispossession, exiles of the final hour — who come into
the world in concrete cubes, pick our fruits at the
supermarket, and watch for an echo of the world on
television — only we get to have an environment. And
there’s no one but us to witness our own annihilation,
as if it were just a simple change of scenery, to get
indignant about the latest nrovr: .s of the disaster, to
patiently compile its encyclopedia.

What has congealed as an environment is a relation-
ship to the world based on management, which is to
say, on estrangement. A relationship to the world
wherein we’re not made up just as much of the
rustling trees, the smell of frying oil in the building,
running water, the hubbub of schoolrooms, the

74 / The Coming Insurrection

mugginess of summer evenings. A relationship to
the world where there is me and then my environ-
ment, surrounding me but never really constituting
me. We have become neighbors in a planetary
board meeting. It’s difficult to imagine a more
complete hell.

No material habitat has ever deserved the name
"environment,” except perhaps the metropolis of
today. The digitized voices making announcements,
streetcars with such a 21st century whistle, bluish
streetlamps shaped like giant matchsticks, pedestrians
done up like failed fashion models, the silent rota-
tion of a video surveillance camera, the lucid clicking
of the subway turnstyles, supermarket checkouts,
office time-clocks, the electronic ambiance of the
cybercafe, the profusion of plasma screens, express
lanes and latex. Never has a setting been so able to
do without the souls traversing it. Never has a milieu
been more automatic. Never has a context been so
indifferent, and demanded in return — as the price of
survival — such an equal indifference from us. Ulti-
mately the environment is nothing more than the
relationship to the world that is proper to the
metropolis, and that projects itself onto everything
that would escape it.

The situation is like this: they hired our parents to
destroy this world, and now they’d like to put us to
work rebuilding it, and — to add insult to injury — at

Sixth Circle / 75

a profit. The morbid excitement that animates jour-
nalists and advertisers these days as they report each
new proof of global warming reveals the steely smile
of the new green capitalism, in the making since the
’70s, which we expected at the turn of the century
but which never came. Well, here it is! It’s sustain-
ability! Alternative solutions, that’s it too! The health
of the planet demands it! No doubt about it any-
more, it’s a green scene; the environment will be the
pivot of the 21st century political economy. A new
volley of “industrial solutions” comes with each
new catastrophic possibility.

The inventor of the H-bomb, Edward Teller, pro-
poses shooting millions of tons of metallic dust into
the stratosphere to stop global warming. NASA,
frustrated at having to shelve its idea of an anti-
missile shield in the museum of cold war horrors,
suggests installing a gigantic mirror beyond the
moon’s orbit to protect us from the sun’s now-fatal
rays. Another vision of the future: a motorized
humanity, driving on bio -ethanol from Sao Paulo to
Stockholm; the dream of cereal growers the world
over, for it only means converting all of the planet’s
arable lands into soy and sugar beet fields. Eco-
friendly cars, clean energy, and environmental
consulting coexist painlessly with the latest Chanel
ad in the pages of glossy magazines.

We are told that the environment has the incom-
parable merit of being the first truly global problem

76 / The Coming Insurrection

presented to humanity. A global problem , which is
to say a problem that only those who are organized
on a global level will be able to solve. And we know
who they are. These are the very same groups that
for close to a century have been the vanguard of
disaster, and certainly intend to remain so, for the
small price of a change of logo. That EDF 1 had the
impudence to trot out its nuclear program as the
new solution to the global energy crisis goes to show
how much the new solutions resemble the old
problems.

From Secretaries of State to the backrooms of
alternative cafes, concerns are always expressed in
the same words, the same as they’ve always been. We
have to get mobilized. This time it’s not to rebuild
the country like in the post-war era, not for the
Ethiopians like in the ’80s, not for employment like
in the ’90s. No, this time it’s for the environment. It
thanks you for your participation. Al Gore and neg-
ative growth movement stand side by side with the
eternal great souls of the Republic to do their part in
reinvigorating the little people of the Left and the
well-known idealism of youth. Voluntary austerity
writ large on their banner, they work benevolently
to get us ready for the “coming ecological state of

L Electricity de France (EDF) is the main electricity generation and
distribution company in France and one of the largest in the world,
supplying most of its power from nuclear reactors.

Sixth Circle / 77

emergency.” The globular sticky mass of their guilt
lands on our tired shoulders, pressuring us to culti-
vate our garden, sort out our trash, and eco-compost
the leftovers of this macabre feast.

Managing the phasing out of nuclear power,
excess C02 in the atmosphere, melting glaciers, hur-
ricanes, epidemics, global overpopulation, erosion of
the soil, mass extinction of living species. . . this will
be our burden. They tell us, “everyone must do their
part,” if we want to save our beautiful model of civi-
lization. We have to consume a little less to be able to
keep consumbig. We have to produce organically to
keep producing. We have to control ourselves to go on
controlling. This is the logic of a world straining to
maintain itself while giving itself an air of historical
rupture. This is how they would like to convince us
to participate in the great industrial challenges of this
century. And in our bewilderment we’re ready to leap
into the arms of the very same ones who presided
over the devastation, in the hope that they will get us
out of it.

Ecology isn’t simply the logic of a total economy; it’s
the new morality of capital. The system’s internal
state of crisis and the rigorous screening that’s under-
way demand a new criterion in the name of which
this screening and selection will be carried out. From
one era to the next, the idea of virtue has never been
anything but an invention of vice. Without ecology,

78 / The Conning Insurrection

how could we justify the existence of two different
diets, one “healthy and organic” for the rich and
their children, and the other notoriously toxic for
the plebes, whose offspring are damned to obesity.
The planetary hyper-bourgeoisie wouldn’t be able to
make its normal lifestyle seem respectable if its latest
whims weren’t so scrupulously “respectful of the
environment.” Without ecology, nothing would
have enough authority to gag every objection to the
exorbitant progress of control.

Tracking, transparency, certification, eco-taxes,
environmental excellence, and the policing of water,
all give us an idea of the coming state of ecological
emergency. Everything is permitted to apower struc-
ture that bases its authority in Nature, in health and
in well-being.

“Once the new economic and behavioral culture
has become common practice, coercive measures
will doubtless fall into disuse of their own accord.”
You’d have to have all the ridiculous aplomb of a TV
crusader to maintain such a frozen perspective and
in the same breath incite us to feel sufficiently “sorry
for the planet” to get mobilized, while remaining
anesthetized enough to watch the whole thing with
restraint and civility. The new green asceticism is
precisely the self-control that is required of us all in
order to negotiate a rescue operation where the sys-
tem has taken itself hostage. Henceforth, it’s in the
name of environmentalism that we must all tighten

Sixth Circle / 79

our belts, just as we did yesterday in the name of the
economy. The roads could certainly be transformed
into bicycle paths, we ourselves could perhaps, to a
certain degree, be grateful one day for a guaranteed
income, but only at the price of an entirely thera-
peutic existence. Those who claim that generalized
self-control will spare us from an environmental
dictatorship are lying: the one will prepare the way
for the other, and well end up with both.

As long as there is Man and Environment, the
police will be there between them.

Everything about the environmentalists’ discourse
must be turned upside-down. Where they talk of
“catastrophes” to label the present system’s misman-
agement of beings and things, we only see the cata-
strophe of its all too perfect operation. The greatest
wave of famine ever known in the tropics (1876-
1879) coincided with a global drought, but more
significantly, it also coincided with the apogee of col-
onization. The destruction of the peasant’s world
and of local alimentary practices meant the disap-
pearance of the means for dealing with scarcity.
More than the lack of water, it was the effect of the
rapidly expanding colonial economy that littered the
Tropics with millions of emaciated corpses. What is
presented everywhere as an ecological catastrophe
has never stopped being, above all, the manifestation
of a disastrous relationship to the world. Inhabiting

80 / The Coming Insurrection

a nowhere makes us vulnerable to the slightest jolt in
the system, to the slightest climactic risk. As the
latest tsunami approached and the tourists continued
to frolic in the waves, the islands’ hunter-gatherers
rushed away from the coast, following the birds.
Environmentalism’s present paradox is that under
the pretext of saving the planet from desolation it
merely saves the causes of its desolation.

The normal functioning of the world serves to
hide our state of truly catastrophic dispossession.
What is called “catastrophe” is no more than the
forced suspension of this state, one of those rare
moments when we regain some sort of presence in
the world. Let the petroleum reserves run out earlier
than expected; let the international flows that regu-
late the tempo of the metropolis be interrupted; let
us suffer some great social disruption and some great
“return to savagery of the population,” a “planetary
threat,” the “end of civilization!” Whatever. Any loss
of control would be preferable to all the crisis man-
agement scenarios they envision. When this comes,
the specialists in sustainable development won’t be
the ones with the best advice. It’s within the mal-
function and short-circuits of the system that we
find the elements of a response whose logic would be
to abolish the problems themselves. Among the
signatory nations to the Kyoto Protocol, the only
countries that have fulfilled their commitments,
in spite of themselves, are Ukraine and Romania.

Sixth Circle / 81

Guess why. The most advanced experimentation
with "organic” agriculture on a global level has taken
place since 1989 on the island of Cuba. Guess why.
And it’s along the African highways, and nowhere
else, that auto mechanics has been elevated to a form
of popular art. Guess how.

What makes the crisis desirable is that in the cri-
sis the environment ceases to be the environment.
We are forced to reestablish contact, albeit a poten-
tially fatal one, with what’s there, to rediscover the
rhythms of reality. What surrounds us is no longer a
landscape, a panorama, a theater, but something to
inhabit, something we need to come to terms with,
something we can learn from. We won’t let ourselves
be led astray by the ones who’ve brought about the
the "catastrophe.” Where the managers platonically
discuss among themselves how they might decrease
emissions “without breaking the bank,” the only
realistic option we can see is to “break the bank” as
soon as possible and, in the meantime, take advan-
tage of every collapse in the system to increase our
own strength.

New Orleans, a few days after Hurricane Katrina. In
this apocalyptic atmosphere, here and there, life is
reorganizing itself. In the face of the inaction of the
public authorities, who were too busy cleaning up the
tourist areas of the French Quarter and protecting
shops to help the poorer city dwellers, forgotten

82 / The Conning Insurrection

forms are reborn. In spite of occasionally strong-
armed attempts to evacuate the area, in spite of white
supremacist lynch mobs, a lot of people refused to
leave the terrain. For the latter, who refused to be
deported like “environmental refugees” all over the
country, and for those who came from all around to
join them in solidarity, responding to a call from a
former Black Panther, self-organization came back to
the fore. In a few weeks time, the Common Ground
Clinic was set up . 2 From the very first days, this
veritable "country hospital” provided free and effec-
tive treatment to those who needed it, thanks to the
constant influx of volunteers. For more than a year
now, the clinic is still the base of a daily resistance to
the clean-sweep operation of government bulldozers,
which are trying to turn that part of the city into a
pasture for property developers. Popular kitchens,
supplies, street medicine, illegal takeovers, the con-
struction of emergency housing, all this practical
knowledge accumulated here and there in the course

2. A certain distance leads to a certain obscurity. Common Ground has
been criticized in North America for the feet that its activities were
geared towards a return to normality — that is, to the normal func-
tioning of things, In any case itclearly remains in the realm of classical
polidcs. The founder of Common Ground, former Black Panther
Malik Rahim, eventually used the project as part of his unsuccessful run
for the US Congress in 2008. ft was later revealed that one of the main
spokesmen for the project, Brandon Darby, was an FBI informant.

Sixth Circle / 83

of a life, has now found a space where it can be
deployed. Far from the uniforms and sirens.

Whoever knew the penniless joy of these New
Orleans neighborhoods before the catastrophe,
their defiance towards the state and the widespread
practice of making do with what’s available wouldn’t
be at all surprised by what became possible there.
On the other hand, anyone trapped in the anemic
and atomized everyday routine of our residential
deserts might doubt that such determination could
be found anywhere anymore. Reconnecting with
such gestures, buried under years of normalized life,
is the only practicable means of not sinking down
with the world, while we dream of an age that is
equal to our passions.

84 / The Coming Insurrection

Seventh Circle

"WE ARE BUILDING A CIVILIZED SPACE HERE”

The first global slaughter, which from 1914 to 1918
did away with a large portion of the urban and rural
proletariat, was waged in the name of freedom,
democracy, and civilization. For the past five years,
the so-called “war on terror” with its special opera-
tions and targeted assassinations has been pursued in
the name of these same values. Yet the resemblance
stops there: at the level of appearances. The value of
civilization is no longer so obvious that it can be
brought to the natives as a package. Freedom is no
longer a name scrawled on walls, for today it is always
followed, as if by its shadow, with the word “securi-
ty.” And it is well known that democracy can be dis-
solved in pure and simple “emergency” edicts — for
example, in the official reinstitution of torture in the
US, or in France’s Perben II law. 1

In a single century, freedom, democracy and
civilization have reverted to the state of hypotheses.
The leaders’ work from now on consists in shaping

1. Perben II is a law introduced in France in 2004 that targets “organized
crime" and “delinquency” and albws for sentencing without trial.

85

the material and moral as well as symbolic and social
conditions in which these hypotheses can be more or
less validated, in configuring spaces where they can
seem to function. All means to these ends are accept-
able, even the least democratic, the least civilized, the
most repressive. It was a century in which democracy
regularly presided over the birth of fascist regimes,
civilization constantly rhymed — to the tune of
Wagner or Iron Maiden — with extermination, and in
which, one day in 1929, freedom showed its two
faces: a banker throwing himself from a window and
a family of workers dying of hunger. Since then — let’s
say; since 1945 — it’s taken for granted that manipu-
lating the masses, secret service operations, the
restriction of public liberties, and the complete
sovereignty of a wide array of police forces were
appropriate ways to ensure democracy, freedom and
civilization. At the final stage of this evolution, we see
the first socialist mayor of Paris putting the finishing
touches on urban pacification with a new police
protocol for a poor neighborhood, announced with
the following carefully chosen words: “We’re building
a civilized space here.” There’s nothing more to say,
everything has to be destroyed.

Though it seems general in nature, the question of
civilization is not at all a philosophical one. A civiliza-
tion is not an abstraction hovering over life. It is what
rules, takes possession of, colonizes the most banal,

86 / The Coming Insurrection

personal, daily existence. It’s what holds together that
which is most intimate and most general. In France,
civilization is inseparable from the state. The older
and more powerful the state, the less it is a super-
structure or exoskeleton of a society and the more it
constitutes the subjectivities that people it. The
French state is the very texture of French subjectivi-
ties, the form assumed by the centuries-old castration
of its subjects. Thus it should come as no surprise that
in their deliriums psychiatric patients are always
confusing themselves with political figures, that we
agree that our leaders are the root of all our ills, that
we like to grumble so much about them and that this
grumbling is the consecration that crowns them as our
masters. Here, politics is not considered something
outside of us but part of ourselves. The life we invest in
these figures is the same life that’s taken from us.

If there is a French exception, this is why. Every-
thing, even the global influence of French literature,
is a result of this amputation. In France, literature
is the prescribed space for the amusement of the
castrated. It is the formal freedom conceded to those
who cannot accommodate themselves to the noth-
ingness of their real freedom. That’s what accounts
for all the obscene winks exchanged, for centuries
now, between the statesmen and men of letters in this
country, as each gladly dons the other’s costume.
That’s also why intellectuals here tend to talk so loud
when they’re so meek, and why they always fail at the

Seventh Circle / 87

decisive moment, the only moment that would've
given meaning to their existence, but that also
would’ve had them banished from their profession.

There exists a credible thesis that modern litera-
ture was born with Baudelaire, Heine, and Flaubert
as a repercussion of the state massacre of June 1848.
It’s in the blood of the Parisian insurgents, against
the silence surrounding the slaughter, that modern
literary forms were born — spleen, ambivalence,
fetishism of form, and morbid detachment. The
neurotic affection that the French pledge to their
Republic — in the name of which every smudge of
ink assumes an air of dignity, and any pathetic hack
is honored — underwrites the perpetual repression of
its originary sacrifices. The June days of 1848 —
1,500 dead in combat, thousands of summary
executions of prisoners, and the Assembly welcoming
the surrender of the last barricade with cries of
“Long Live the Republic!” — and the Bloody Week
of 1871 are birthmarks no surgery can hide.

In 1945, Kojeve wrote: "The “official” political ideal
of France and of the French is today still that of the
nation-State, of the ‘one and indivisible Republic.’ On
the other hand, in the depths of its soul, the country
understands the inadequacy of this ideal, of the
political anachronism of the strictly “national” idea.
This feeling has admittedly not yet reached the level
of a clear and distinct idea: The country cannot, and

88 / The Coming Insurrection

will not yet express it openly. Moreover, for the very
reason of the unparalleled brilliance of its national
past, it is especially difficult for Prance to recognize
clearly and to accept frankly the fact of the end of
the ‘national’ period of History and to understand
all of its consequences. It is hard for a country which
created, out of nothing, the ideological framework of
nationalism and exported it to the whole world to
recognize that all that remains of it now is a docu-
ment to be filed in the historical archives.’

This question of the nation-state and its mourning
is at the heart of what for the past half-century can
only be called the French malaise. We politely give the
name of “alternation” to this twitchy indecision,
this pendulum-like oscillation from left to right, then
right to left; like a manic phase after a depressive one
that is then followed by another, or the way a com-
pletely rhetorical critique of individualism uneasily
co-exists with the most ferocious cynicism, or the
greatest generosity with an aversion to crowds. Since
1945, this malaise, which seems to have dissipated
only during the insurrectionary fervor of May 68, has
continually worsened. The era of states, nations and
republics is coming to an end, and the country that
sacrificed all its vitality to these forms remains
stunned by that fact. The trouble caused by Jospin’s
simple sentence “The state can’t do everything”
allows us to imagine the reaction when it becomes
clear that the state can no longer do anything at all.

Seventh Circle / 89

The feeling that we’ve been tricked is like a wound
that is becoming increasingly infected. It’s the source
of the latent rage that just about anything will set off
these days. The fact that in this country the obituary
of the age of nations has yet to be written is the key to
the French anachronism, and to the revolutionary
possibilities France still has in store.

Whatever their outcome may be, the role of the
next presidential elections will be to signal the end of
French illusions and to burst the historical bubble in
which we are living — and which makes possible
events like the anti-CPE movement, that was puzzled
over by other countries as if it were some bad dream
that escaped from the ’70s. That’s why, deep down,
no one wants these elections. France is indeed the red
lantern of the western zone. 2

Today the West is the GI who dashes into Fallujah on
an Ml Abrams tank, listening to heavy metal at top
volume. It’s the tourist lost on the Mongolian plains,
mocked by all, who clutches his credit card as his
only lifeline. It’s the CEO who swears by the game
Go. It’s the young girl who looks for happiness in
clothes, guys, and moisturizing creams. It’s the Swiss
human rights activist who travels to the four corners
of the earth to show solidarity with all the world’s
rebels — provided they’ve been defeated. It’s the

2. The “red lantern*’ is the last place finisher in the Tour de France.

90 / The Coming Insurrection

Spaniard who could care less about political freedom
now that he’s been granted sexual freedom. It’s the
art lover who wants us to be awestruck before the
“modern genius” of a century of artists, from surre-
alism to Viennese actionism, all competing to see
who could best spit in the face of civilization. It’s
the cyberneticist who’s found a realistic theory of
consciousness in Buddhism and the quantum
physicist who’s hoping that dabbling in Hindu
metaphysics will inspire new scientific discoveries.

The West is a civilization that has survived all the
prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem.
Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself zzj a class in
order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a
whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital
had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to
impose itself as a social relation — becoming cultural
capital and health capital in addition to finance
capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a
religion in order to survive as an affective structure —
as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and
weakness; so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular
civilization in order to impose itself as a universal cul-
ture. The operation can be summarized like this: an
entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a con-
tent in order to survive as a form.

The fragmented individual survives as a form
thanks to the “spiritual” technologies of counseling.
Patriarchy survives by attributing to women all the

Seventh Circle / 91

worst attributes of men: willfulness, self-control,
insensitivity. A disintegrated society survives by
propagating an epidemic of sociability and enter-
tainment. So it goes with all the great, outmoded
fictions of the West maintaining themselves through
artifices that contradict these fictions point by point.

There is no "dash of civilizations.” There is a dinically
dead civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support
machines that spread a peculiar plague into the
planet’s atmosphere. At this point it can no longer
believe in a single one of its own “values,” and any
affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a
provocation that should and must be taken apart,
deconstructed ', and returned to a state of doubt. Today
Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism,
of the "It all depends on your point of view”; it’s the
eye-rolling or the wounded indignation at anyone
who’s stupid, primitive, or presumptuous enough to
still bdieve in something, to affirm anything at all.
You can see the dogmatism of constant questioning
give its complicit wink of the eye everywhere in the
universities and among the literary intdligentsias. No
critique is too radical among postmodernist thinkers,
as long as it maintains this total absence of certitude.
A century ago, scandal was identified with any par-
ticularly unruly and raucous negation, while today
it’s found in any affirmation that fails to tremble.

92 / The Coming Insurrection

No social order can base itself for long on the prin-
ciple that nothing is true. Yet it must be made secure.
Applying the concept of "security” to everything
these days is the expression of a project to securely
fasten onto places, behaviors, and even people them-
selves, an ideal order to which they are no longer
ready to submit. Saying "nothing is true” says nothing
about the world but everything about the Western
concept of truth. For the West, truth is not an
attribute of beings or things, but of their representa-
tion. A representation that conforms to experience is
held to be true. Science is, in the last analysis, this
empire of universal verification. Since all human
behavior, from the most ordinary to the most
learned, is based on a foundation of unevenly for-
mulated facts, and since all practices start from a
point where things and their representations can no
longer be distinguished, a measure of truth that the
Western concept excludes enters into every life. We
talk in the West about “real people,” but only in
order to mock these simpletons. This is why
Westerners have always been thought of as liars and
hypocrites by the people they’ve colonized. This is
why they’re envied for what they have , for their
technological development, but never for what they
are , for which they are rightly held in contempt.
Sade, Nietzsche and Artaud wouldn’t be taught in
schools if the kind of truth mentioned above was not
discredited in advance. Containing all affirmations

Seventh Circle / 93

and deactivating all certainties as they irresistibly
come to light — such is the long labor of the Western
intellect. The police and philosophy are two conver-
gent, if formally distinct, means to this end.

Of course, this imperialism of the relative finds a
suitable enemy in every empty dogmatism, in
whatever form of Marxist-Leninism, Salifism, or
Neo-Nazism: anyone who, like Westerners, mistakes
provocation for affirmation.

At this juncture, any strictly social contestation that
refuses to see that what we’re facing is not the crisis
of a society but the extinction of a civilization
becomes an accomplice in its perpetuation. It’s even
become a contemporary strategy to critique this
society in the vain hope of saving the civilization.

So we have a corpse on our backs, but we won’t be
able to shake it off just like that. Nothing is to be
expected from the end of civilization, from its clin-
ical death. Such a thing can only be of interest to
historians. It’s a fact, and it must be translated into a
decision. Facts can be conjured away, but decision is
political. To decide for the death of civilization, then
to work out how it will happen: only decision will rid
us of the corpse.

94 / The Coming Insurrection

GET GOING!

We can no longer even see how an insurrection
might begin. Sixty years of pacification and con-
tainment of historical upheavals, sixty years of
democratic anesthesia and the management of
events, have dulled our perception of the real, our
sense of the war in progress. We need to start by
recovering this perception.

It’s useless to get indignant about openly unconsti-
tutional laws such as Perben II. It’s futile to legally
protest the complete implosion of the legal frame-
work. We have to get organized.

It’s useless to get involved in this or that citizens’
group, in this or that dead-end of the far left, or in
the latest “community effort.” Every organization
that claims to contest the present order mimics the
form, mores and language of miniature states. Thus
far, every impulse to "do politics differently” has
only contributed to the indefinite spread of the
state’s tentacles.

95

It’s useless to react to the news of the day; instead we
should understand each report as a maneuver in a
hostile field of strategies to be decoded, operations
designed to provoke a specific reaction. It’s these
operations themselves that should be taken as the
real information contained in these pieces of news.

It’s useless to wait — for a breakthrough, for the revo-
lution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement.
To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not
coming, it is here. We are already situated withm the
collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that
we must choose sides.

To no longer wait is, in one way or another, to enter
into the logic of insurrection. It is once again to hear
the slight but always present trembling of terror in the
voices of our leaders. Because governing has never
been anything other than postponing by a thousand
subterfuges the moment when the crowd will string
you up, and every act of government is nothing but a
way of not losing control of the population.

We’re setting out from a point of extreme isolation, of
extreme weakness. An insurrectional process must be
built from the ground up. Nothing appears less likely
than an insurrection, but nothing is more necessary.

96/ The Coming Insurrection

FIND EACH OTHER

Attach yourself to what you feel to be true.

Begin there.

An encounter, a discovery, a vast wave of strikes, an
earthquake: every event produces truth by changing
our way of being in the world. Conversely, any
observation that leaves us indifferent, doesn’t affect
us, doesn’t commit us to anything, no longer
deserves the name truth. There’s a truth beneath
every gesture, every practice, every relationship, and
every situation. We usually just avoid it, manage it,
which produces the madness of so many in our era.
In reality, everything involves everything else. The
feeling that one is living a lie is still a truth. It is a
matter of not letting it go, of starting from there. A
truth isn’t a view on the world but what binds us to
it in an irreducible way. A truth isn’t something we
hold but something that carries us. It makes and
unmakes me, constitutes and undoes me as an indi-
vidual; it distances me from many and brings me
closer to those who also experience it. An isolated
being who holds fast to a truth will inevitably meet

97

others like her. In fact, every insurrectional process
starts from a truth that we refuse to give up. During
the ’80s in Hamburg, a few inhabitants of a squatted
house decided that from then on they would only be
evicted over their dead bodies. A neighborhood was
besieged by tanks and helicopters, with days of street
battles, huge demonstrations — and a mayor who,
finally, capitulated. In 1940, Georges Guingouin,
the "first French resistance fighter,” started with
nothing but the certainty of his refusal of the Nazi
occupation. At that time, to the Communist Party,
he was nothing but a "madman living in the woods,”
until there were 20,000 madmen living in the
woods, and Limoges was liberated.

Don’t back away from what is political
in friendship.

We’ve been given a neutral idea of friendship,
understood as a pure affection with no consequences.
But all affinity is affinity within a common truth.
Every encounter is an encounter within a common
affirmation, even the affirmation of destruction. No
bonds are innocent in an age when holding onto
something and refusing to let go usually leads to
unemployment, where you have to lie to work, and
you have to keep on working in order to continue
lying. People who swear by quantum physics and
pursue its consequences in all domains are no less

98 / The Coining Insurrection

bound, politically than comrades fighting against a
multinational agribusiness. They will all be led,
sooner or later, to defection and to combat.

The pioneers of the workers’ movement were
able to find each other in the workshop, then in the
factory. They had the strike to show their numbers
and unmask the scabs. They had the wage relation,
pitting the party of capital against the party of
labor, on which they could draw the lines of soli-
darity and of battle on a global scale. We have the
whole of social space in which to find each other.
We have everyday insubordination for showing our
numbers and unmasking cowards. We have our
hostility to this civilization for drawing lines of
solidarity and of battle on a global scale.

Expect nothing from organizations.

Beware of all existing social milieus,
and above all, don’t become one.

It’s not uncommon, in the course of a significant
breaking of the social bond, to cross paths with
organizations — political, labor, humanitarian, com-
munity associations, etc. Among their members,
one may even find individuals who are sincere — if
a little desperate — who are enthusiastic — if a little
conniving. Organizations are attractive due to their
apparent consistency — they have a history, a head
office, a name, resources, a leader, a strategy and a

Find Each Other / 99

discourse. They are nonetheless empty structures,
which, in spite of their grand origins, can never be
filled. In all their affairs, at every level, these orga-
nizations are concerned above all with their own
survival as organizations, and little else. Their
repeated betrayals have often alienated the commit-
ment of their own rank and file. And this is why you
can, on occasion, run into worthy beings within
them. But the promise of the encounter can only be
realized outside the organization and, unavoidably,
at odds with it.

Far more dreadful are social milieus., with their
supple texture, their gossip, and their informal
hierarchies. Flee all milieus. Each and every milieu is
oriented towards the neutralization of some truth.
Literary circles exist to smother the clarity of writ-
ing. Anarchist milieus to blunt the directness of
direct action. Scientific milieus to withhold the
implications of their research from the majority of
people today. Sport milieus to contain in their gyms
the various forms of life they should create. Partic-
ularly to be avoided are the cultural and activist
circles. They are the old people’s homes where all
revolutionary desires traditionally go to die. The
task of cultural circles is to spot nascent intensities
and to explain away the sense of whatever it is you’re
doing, while the task of activist circles is to sap your
energy for doing it. Activist milieus spread their
diffuse web throughout the French territory, and are

100 / The Coming Insurrection

encountered on the path of every revolutionary
development. They offer nothing but the story of
their many defeats and the bitterness these have
produced. Their exhaustion has made them inca-
pable of seizing the possibilities of the present.
Besides, to nurture their wretched passivity they
talk far too much and this makes them unreliable
when it comes to the police. Just as it’s useless to
expect anything from them, it’s stupid to be disap-
pointed by their sclerosis. It’s best to just abandon
this dead weight.

All milieus are counter-revolutionary because
they are only concerned with the preservation of
their sad comfort.

Form communes.

Communes come into being when people find each
other, get on with each other, and decide on a
common path. The commune is perhaps what gets
decided at the very moment when we would nor-
mally part ways. It’s the joy of an encounter that
survives its expected end. It’s what makes us say
“we,” and makes that an event. What’s strange isn’t
that people who are attuned to each other form
communes, but that they remain separated. Why
shouldn’t communes proliferate everywhere? In
every factory, every street, every village, every school.
At long last, the reign of the base committees!

Find Each Other / 101

Communes that accept being what they are, where
they are. And if possible, a multiplicity of communes
that will displace the institutions of society: family,
school, union, sports club, etc. Communes that aren’t
afraid, beyond their specifically political activities, to
organize themselves for the material and moral sur-
vival of each of their members and of all those
around them who remain adrift. Communes that
would not define themselves — as collectives tend to
do- — by what’s inside and what’s outside them, but by
the density of the ties at their core. Not by their
membership, but by the spirit that animates them.

A commune forms every time a few people, freed
of their individual straitjackets, decide to rely only
on themselves and measure their strength against
reality. Every wildcat strike is a commune; every
building occupied collectively and on a clear basis is
a commune. The action committees of 1968 were
communes, as were the slave maroons in the United
States, or Radio Alice in Bologna in 1977. Every
commune seeks to be its own base. It seeks to dis-
solve the question of needs. It seeks to break all
economic dependency and all political subjugation;
it degenerates into a milieu the moment it loses con-
tact with the truths on which it is founded. There
are all kinds of communes that wait neither for the
numbers nor the means to get organized, and even
less for the “right moment” — which never arrives.

102 / The Coming Insurrection

GET ORGANIZED

Get organized, in order to no longer have to work.

We know that individuals are possessed of so little life
that they have to earn a living , to sell their time in
exchange for a modicum of social existence. Personal
time for social existence: such is work, such is the
market. From the outset, the time of the commune
eludes work, it doesn’t function according to that
scheme — it prefers others. Groups of Argentine
piqtieteros collectively extort a sort of local welfare
conditioned by a few hours of work; they don’t clock
their hours, they put their benefits in common and
acquire clothing workshops, a bakery, putting in
place the gardens that thw need.

The commune needs money, but not because we
need to earn a living. All communes have their black
markets. There are plenty of hustles. Aside from
welfare, there are various benefits, disability money,
accumulated student aid, subsidies drawn off ficti-
tious childbirths, all kinds of trafficking, and so
many other means that arise with every mutation of
control. It’s not for us to defend them, or to install

103

ourselves in these temporary shelters or to preserve
them as a privilege for those in the know. The impor-
tant thing is to cultivate and spread this necessary
disposition towards fraud, and to share its innova-
tions. For communes, the question of work is only
posed in relation to other already existing incomes.
And we shouldn’t forget all the useful knowledge that
can be acquired through certain trades, professions
and well-positioned jobs.

The exigency of the commune is to free up the most
time for the most people. And we’re not just talking
about the number of hours free of any wage-labor
exploitation. Liberated time doesn’t mean a vacation.
Vacant time, dead time, the time of emptiness and the
fear of emptiness — this is the time of work. There will
be no more time to fill, but a liberation of energy that
no "time’ contains; lines that take shape, that accen-
tuate each other, that we can follow at our leisure, to
their ends, until we see them cross with others.

Plunder, cultivate, fabricate.

Some former MetalEurop employees become bank
robbers rather than prison guards. Some EDF employees
show friends and family how to rig the electricity
meters. Commodities that "fell off the back of a truck’
are sold left and right. A world that so openly proclaims
its cynicism can’t expect much loyalty from proletarians.

104 / The Coming Insurrection

On the one hand, a commune can’t bank on- the
“welfare state” being around forever, and on the
other, it can’t count on living for long off shoplifting,
nighttime dumpster diving at supermarkets or in the
warehouses of the industrial zones, misdirecting
government subsidies, ripping off insurance companies
and other frauds, in a word: plunder. So it has to con-
sider how to continually increase the level and scope
of its self-organization. Nothing would be more
logical than using the lathes, milling machines, and
photocopiers sold at a discount after a factory closure
to support a conspiracy against commodity society.

The feeling of imminent collapse is everywhere so
strong these days that it would be hard to enumerate
all of the current experiments in matters of construc-
tion, energy, materials, illegality or agriculture. There’s
a wholij set of skills and techniques just waiting to be
plundered and ripped from their humanistic, street-
culture, or eco-friendly trappings. Yet this group of
experiments is but one part of all of the intuitions,
the know-how, and the ingenuity found in slums that
will have to be deployed if we intend to repopulate
the metropolitan desert and ensure the viability of
an insurrection beyond its first stages.

How will we communicate and move about during
a total interruption of the flows? How will we restore
food production in rural areas to the point where
they can once again support the population density
that they had sixty years ago? How will we transform

Get Organized / 105

concrete spaces into urban vegetable gardens, as
Cuba has done in order to withstand both the
American embargo and the liquidation of the USSR?

Training and learning.

What are we left with, having used up most of the
leisure authorized by market democracy? What was it
thatmadeusgo jogging on a Sunday morning? What
keeps all these karate fanatics, these DIY, fishing, or
mycology freaks going? What, if not the need to fill
up some totally idle time, to reconstitute their labor
power or “health capital”? Most recreational activities
could easily be stripped of their absurdity and
become something else. Boxing has not always been
limited to the staging of spectacular matches. At the
beginning of the 20th century, as China was carved
up by hordes of colonists and starved by long
droughts, hundreds of thousands of its poor peasants
organized themselves into countless open-air boxing
clubs, in order to take back what the colonists and
the rich had taken from them. This was the Boxer
Rebellion. It’s never too early to learn and practice
what less pacified, less predictable times might
require of us. Our dependence on the metropolis —
on its medicine, its agriculture, its police — is so
great at present that we can’t attack it without
putting ourselves in danger. An unspoken awareness
of this vulnerability accounts for the spontaneous

106/ The Conning Insurrection

self-limitation of today’s social movements, and
explains our fear of crises and our desire for “security;”
It’s for this reason that strikes have usually traded the
prospect of revolution for a return to normalcy.
Escaping this fate calls for a long and consistent
process of apprenticeship, and for multiple, massive
experiments. It’s a question of knowing how to fight,
to pick locks, to set broken bones and treat sicknesses;
how to build a pirate radio transmitter; how to set up
street kitchens; how to aim straight; how to gather
together scattered knowledge and set up wartime
agronomics; understand plankton biology; soil com-
position; study the way plants interact; get to know
possible uses for and connections with our immediate
environment as well as the limits we can’t go beyond
without exhausting it. We must start today, in prepa-
ration for the days when we’ll need more than just a
symbolic portion of our nourishment and care.

Create territories. Multiply zones of opacity.

More and more reformists today agree that with “the
approach of peak oil,” and in order to "reduce green-
house gas emissions,” we will need to “relocalize the
economy,” encourage regional supply lines, small
distribution circuits, renounce easy access to imports
from far away, etc. What they forget is that what
characterizes everything that’s done in a local econo-
my is that it’s done under the table, in an “informal”

Get Organized / 107

way; that this simple ecological measure of relocalizing
the economy implies nothing less than total freedom
from state control. Or else total submission to it.

Today’s territory is the product of many centuries
of police operations. People have been pushed out of
their fields, then their streets, then their neighbor-
hoods, and finally from the hallways of their
buildings, in the demented hope of containing all life
between the four sweating walls of privacy. The terri-
torial question isn’t the same for us as it is for the
state. For us it’s not about possessing territory. Rather,
it’s a matter of increasing the density of the com-
munes, of circulation, and of solidarities to the point
that the territory becomes unreadable, opaque to all
authority. We don’t want to occupy the territory, we
want to be the territory.

Every practice brings a territory into existence — a
dealing territory, or a hunting territory; a territory of
child’s play, of lovers, of a riot; a territory of farmers,
ornithologists, or flaneurs. The rule is simple: the
more territories there are superimposed on a given
zone, the more circulation there is between them, the
harder it will be for power to get a handle on them.
Bistros, print shops, sports facilities, wastelands, sec-
ond-hand book stalls, building rooftops, improvised
street markets, kebab shops and garages can all easily
be used for purposes other than their official ones if
enough complicities come together in them. Local
self-organization superimposes its own geography

108/ The Conning Insurrection

over the state cartography, scrambling and blurring
it: it produces its own secession.

Travel. Open our own lines of communication.

The principle of communes is not to counter the
metropolis and its mobility with local slowness and
rootedness. The expansive movement of commune
formation should surreptitiously overtake the move-
ment of the metropolis. We don’t have to reject the
possibilities of travel and communication that the
commercial infrastructure offers; we just have to
know their limits. We just have to be prudent,
innocuous. Visits in person are more secure, leave no
trace, and forge much more consistent connections
than any list of contacts on the internet. The privi-
lege many of us enjoy of being able to “circulate
freely’ from one end of the continent to the other,
and even across the world without too much trouble,
is not a negligible asset when it comes to communi-
cation between pockets of conspiracy. One of the
charms of the metropolis is that it allows Americans,
Greeks, Mexicans, and Germans to meet furtively in
Paris for the time it takes to discuss strategy.

Constant movement between friendly communes
is one of the things that keeps them from drying up
and from the inevitability of abandonment. Wel-
coming comrades, keeping abreast of their initiatives,
reflecting on their experiences and making use of

Get Organized / 1 09

new techniques they’ve developed does more good
for a commune than sterile self-examinations behind
closed doors. It would be a mistake to underestimate
how much can be decisively worked out over the
course of evenings spent comparing views on the war
in progress.

Remove all obstacles, one by one.

It’s well known that the streets teem with incivilities.
Between what they are and what they should be
stands the centripetal force of the police, doing their
best to restore order to them; and on the other side
there’s us, the opposite centrifugal movement. We
can’t help but delight in the fits of anger and disorder
wherever they erupt. It’s not surprising that these
national festivals that arent really celebrating anything
anymore are now systematically going bad Whether
sparkling or dilapidated, the urban fixtures — but
where do they begin? where do they end?- — embody
our common dispossession. Persevering in their
nothingness, they ask for nothing more than to
return to that state for good. Take a look at what
surrounds us: all this will have its final hour. The
metropolis suddenly takes on an air of nostalgia, like
a field of ruins.

All the incivilities of the streets should become
methodical and systematic, converging in a diffuse,
effective guerrilla war that restores us to our

1 1 0 / T h e Coming Insurrection

ungovernability, our primordial unruliness. It’s
disconcerting to some that this same lack of disci-
pline figures so prominently among the recognized
military virtues of resistance fighters. In fact though,
rage and politics should never have been separated.
Without the first, the second is lost in discourse;
without the second the first exhausts itself in howls.
When words like “ enrages ’ and “exaltes” resurface in
politics they’re always greeted with warning shots . 1

As for methods, let’s adopt the following principle
from sabotage: a minimum of risk in taking the action,
a minimum of time, and maximum damage. As for
strategy, we will remember that an obstacle that has
been cleared away, leaving a liberated but uninhabited
space, is easily replaced by another obstacle, one that
offers more resistance and is harder to attack.

No need to dwell too long on the three types of
workers’ sabotage: reducing the speed of work, from
‘easy does it” pacing to the “work-to-rule” strike;
breaking the machines, or hindering their function;
and divulging company secrets. Broadened to the
dimensions of the whole social factory, the principles
of sabotage can be applied to both production and
circulation. The technical infrastructure of the
metropolis is vulnerable. Its flows amount to more
than the transportation of people and commodities.

1. The enragA and exaltfs were both radical groups in the French revolution.

Get Organized /111

Information and energy circulate via wire networks,
fibers and channels, and these can be attacked.
Nowadays sabotaging the social machine with any
real effect involves reappropriating and reinventing
the ways of interrupting its networks. How can a
TGV line or an electrical network be rendered useless?
How does one find the weak points in computer
networks, or scramble radio waves and fill screens
with white noise?

As for serious obstacles, it’s wrong to imagine
them invulnerable to all destruction. The prome-
thean element in all of this boils down to a certain
use of fire, all blind voluntarism aside. In 356 BC,
Erostratus burned down the temple of Artemis, one
of the seven wonders of the world. In our time of
utter decadence, the only thing imposing about
temples is the dismal truth that they are already ruins.

Annihilating this nothingness is hardly a sad task. It
gives action a fresh demeanor. Everything suddenly
coalesces and makes sense — space, time, friendship.
We must use all means at our disposal and rethink
their uses — we ourselves being means. Perhaps, in the
misery of the present, “fucking it all up” will serve —
not without reason — as the last collective seduction.

Flee visibility. Turn anonymity into an offensive position.

In a demonstration, a union member tears the mask
off of an anonymous person who has just broken a

112/ The Coming Insurrection

window. “Take responsibility for what you’re doing
instead of hiding yourself.” But to be visible is to be
exposed, that is to say above all, vulnerable. When
leftists everywhere continually make their cause
more “visible” — whether that of the homeless, of
women, or of undocumented immigrants — in hopes
that it will get dealt with, they’re doing exactly the
contrary of what must be done. Not making our-
selves visible, but instead turning the anonymity to
which we’ve been relegated to our advantage, and
through conspiracy, nocturnal or faceless actions,
creating an invulnerable position of attack. The fires
of November 2005 offer a model for this. No leader,
no demands, no organization, but words, gestures,
complicities. To be socially nothing is not a humili-
ating condition, the source of some tragic lack of
recognition — from whom do we seek recogni-
tion? — but is on the contrary the condition for max-
imum freedom of action. Not claiming your illegal
actions, only attaching to them some fictional
acronym — we still remember the ephemeral BAFT
(. Brigade Anti-Flic des Tarteretsf — is a way to pre-
serve that freedom. Quite obviously, one of the
regime’s first defensive maneuvers was the creation
of a “ banlieue ” subject, to be treated as the author of

2. Tarter&s is a banlieue in the Essonne region of France. The “Tarterets
Anti-Cop Brigade” was a name that was employed to daim responsibility
for actions against police in this area in the ’80s.

Get Organized / 1 1 3

the “riots of November 2005.” Just looking at the
faces on some of this society’s somebodies illustrates
why there’s such joy in being nobody.

Visibility must be avoided. But a force that
gathers in the shadows can’t avoid it forever. Our
appearance as a force must be reserved for the oppor-
tune moment. The longer we avoid visibility, the
stronger we’ll be when it catches up with us. And
once we become visible our days will be numbered.
Either we will be in a position to break its hold in
short order, or we’ll be crushed in no time.

Organize self-defense.

We live under an occupation, under police occupa-
tion. Undocumented immigrants are rounded up in
the middle of the street, unmarked police cars patrol
the boulevards, metropolitan districts are pacified
with techniques forged in the colonies, the Minister
of the Interior makes declarations of war on “gangs”
that remind us of the Algerian war — we are reminded
of it every day. These are reasons enough to no
longer let ourselves be beaten down, reasons enough
to organize our self-defense.

To the extent that it grows and radiates, a com-
mune begins to see the operations of power target
that which constitutes it These counterattacks take
the form of seduction, of recuperation, and as a last
resort, brute force. For a commune, self-defense must

114/ The Coming Insurrection

be a collective fact, as much practical as theoretical.
Preventing an arrest, gathering quickly and in large
numbers against eviction attempts and sheltering one
of our own, will not be superfluous reflexes in
coming times. We cannot ceaselessly reconstruct our
bases from scratch. Let’s stop denouncing repression
and instead prepare to confront it.

It’s not a simple affair, for we expect a surge in
police work being done by the population itself —
everything from snitching to occasional participation
in citizens’ militias. The police forces blend in with
the crowd. The ubiquitous model of police interven-
tion, even in riot situations, is now the cop in civilian
clothes. The effectiveness of the police during the last
anti-CPE demonstrations was a result of plainclothes
off icers mixing among us and waiting for an incident
before revealing who they are: gas, nightsticks, tazers,
detainment; all in strict coordination with demon-
stration stewards. The mere possibility of their
presence was enough to create suspicion amongst the
demonstrators — who’s who? — and to paralyze action.
If we agree that a demonstration is not merely a way
to stand and be counted but a means of action, we
have to equip ourselves with better resources to
unmask plainclothes officers, chase them off, and if
need be snatch back those they’re trying to arrest.

The police are not invincible in the streets, they
simply have the means to organize, train, and con-
tinually test new weapons. Our weapons, on the

Gel Organized / 1 1 5

other hand, are always rudimentary, cobbled-
together, and often improvised on the spot. Ours
certainly can’t hope to match theirs in firepower,
but can be used to hold them at a distance, redirect
attention, exercise psychological pressure or force
passage and gain ground by surprise. None of the
innovations in urban anti-guerilla warfare that are
being taught in the French police academies are
adequate to respond rapidly to a moving multiplici-
ty that can strike a number of places at once and that
tries to always keep the initiative.

Communes are obviously vulnerable to surveillance
and police investigations, to policing technologies
and intelligence gathering. The waves of arrests of
anarchists in Italy and of eco-warriors in the US
were made possible by wiretapping. Everyone
detained by the police now has his or her DNA sam-
pled and added to an ever more complete profile. A
squatter from Barcelona was caught because he left
fingerprints on fliers he was distributing. Tracking
methods are becoming better and better, mostly
through biometric techniques. And if the distribu-
tion of electronic identity cards is instituted, our
task will just be that much more difficult. The Paris
Commune found a partial solution to the keeping of
records: they burned down City Hall, destroying all
the public records and vital statistics. We still need
to find the means to permanently destroy computer-
ized databases.

116/ The Conning Insurrection

INSURRECTION

The commune is the basic unit of partisan reality.
An insurrectional surge may be nothing more than
a multiplication of communes, their coming into
contact and forming of ties. As events unfold,
communes will either merge into larger entities or
fragment. The difference between a band of brothers
and sisters bound “for life” and the gathering of
many groups, committees and gangs for organizing
the supply and self-defense of a neighborhood or
even a region in revolt, is only a difference of scale,
they are all communes.

A commune tends by its nature towards self-
sufficiency and considers money, internally, as
something foolish and ultimately out of place. The
power of money is to connect those who are
unconnected, to link strangers as strangers and thus,
by making everything equivalent, to put everything
into circulation.

The cost of money’s capacity to connect every-
thing is the superficiality of the connection, where
deception is the rule. Distrust is the basis of the credit
relation The reign of money is, therefore, always the

117

reign of control. The practical abolition of money
will happen only with the extension of communes.
Communes must be extended while making sure
they do not exceed a certain size, beyond which they
lose touch with themselves and give rise, almost with-
out fail, to a dominant caste. It would be preferable
for the commune to split up and to spread in that
way, avoiding such an unfortunate outcome.

The uprising of Algerian youth that erupted
across all of Kabylia in the spring of 2001 managed
to take over almost the entire territory, attacking
police stations, courthouses and every representation
of the state, generalizing the revolt to the point of
compelling the unilateral retreat of the forces of order
and physically preventing the elections. The move-
ment’s strength was in the diffuse complementarity
of its components — only partially represented by the
interminable and hopelessly male-dominated village
assemblies and other popular committees. The
“communes” of this still-simmering insurrection had
many faces: the young hotheads in helmets lobbing
gas canisters at the riot police from the rooftop of a
building inTizi Ouzou; the wry smile of an old resis-
tance fighter draped in his burnous; the spirit of the
women in the mountain villages, stubbornly carrying
on with the traditional farming, without which the
blockades of the region’s economy would never have
been as constant and systematic as they were.

118/ The Coming Insurrection

Make the most of ever)’ crisis.

“So it must be said, too, that we won’t be able to treat
the entire French population. Choices will have to be
made.” This is how a virology expert sums up, in a
September 7, 2005 article in Le Monde , what would
happen in the event of a bird flu pandemic. "Terrorist
threats,” “natural disasters,” “virus warnings,” “social
movements” and "urban violence” are, for society’s
managers, so many moments of instability where
they reinforce their power, by the selection of those
who please them and the elimination of those who
make things difficult. Clearly these are, in turn,
opportunities for other forces to consolidate or
strengthen one another as they take the other side.

The interruption of the flow of commodities, the
suspension of normality (it’s sufficient to see how
social life returns in a building suddenly deprived of
electricity to imagine what life could become in a city
deprived of everything) and police control liberate
potentialities for self-organization unthinkable in
other circumstances. People are not blind to this. The
revolutionary workers’ movement understood it well,
and took advantage of the crises of the bourgeois
economy to gather strength. Today, Islamic parties
are strongest when they’ve been able to intelligently
compensate for the weakness of the state— as
when they provided aid after the earthquake in
Boumerdes, Algeria, or in the daily assistance offered

Insurrection / 1 1 9

the population of southern Lebanon after it was
ravaged by the Israeli army.

As we mentioned above, the devastation of New
Orleans by hurricane Katrina gave a certain fringe of
the North American anarchist movement the oppor-
tunity to achieve an unfamiliar cohesion by rallying
all those who refused to be forcefully evacuated.
Street kitchens require building up provisions before-
hand; emergency medical aid requires the acquisition
of necessary knowledge and materials, as does the
setting up of pirate radios. The political richness of
such experiences is assured by the joy they contain,
the way they transcend individual stoicism, and their
manifestation of a tangible reality that escapes the
daily ambience of order and work.

In a country like France, where radioactive clouds
stop at the border and where we aren’t afraid to build
a cancer research center on the former site of a nitro-
gen fertilizer factory that has been condemned by
the EU’s industrial safety agency, we should count
less on “natural” crises than on social ones. It is
usually up to the social movements to interrupt the
normal course of the disaster. Of course, in recent
years the various strikes were primarily opportunities
for the government and corporate management to
test their ability to maintain a larger and larger
“minimum service,” to the point of reducing the
work stoppage to a purely symbolic dimension,
causing little more damage than a snowstorm or a

1 20 / The Coming Insurrection

suicide on the railroad tracks. By going against
established activist practices through the systematic
occupation of institutions and obstinate blockading,
the high-school students’ struggle of 2005 and the
struggle against the CPE-law reminded us of the
ability of large movements to cause trouble and carry
out diffuse offensives. In all the affinity groups they
spawned and left in their wake, we glimpsed the
conditions that allow social movements to become a
locus for the emergence of new communes.

Sabotage every representative authority.

Spread the talk
Abolish general assemblies.

The first obstacle every social movement faces, long
before the police proper, are the unions and the entire
micro-bureaucracy whose job it is to control the
struggle. Communes, collectives and gangs are natu-
rally distrustful of these structures. That’s why the
parabureaucrats have for the past twenty years been
inventing coordination committees and spokes coun-
cils that seem more innocent because they lack an
established label, but are in fact the ideal terrain for
their maneuvers. When a stray collective makes an
attempt at autonomy, they won’t be satisfied until
they’ve drained the attempt of all content by pre-
venting any real question from being addressed. They
get fierce and worked up not out of passion for

Insurrection / 1 21

debate but out of a passion for shutting it down. And
when their dogged defense of apathy finally does the
collective in, they explain its failure by citing a lack of
political consciousness. It must be noted that in
France the militant youth are well versed in the art of
political manipulation, thanks largely to the frenzied
activity of various Trotskyist factions. They could not
be expected to learn the lesson of the conflagration of
November 2005: that coordinations are unnecessary
where coordination exists, organizations aren’t needed
when people organize themselves.

Another reflex is to call a general assembly at the
slightest sign of movement, and vote. This is a mis-
take. The business of voting and deciding a winner is
enough to turn the assembly into a nightmare, into a
theater where all the various little pretenders to
power confront each other. Here we suffer from the
bad example of bourgeois parliaments. An assembly
is not a place for decisions but for talk, for free speech
exercised without a goal.

The need to assemble is as constant among
humans as the necessity of making decisions is rare.
Assembling corresponds to the joy of feeling a com-
mon power. Decisions are vital only in emergency
situations, where the exercise of democracy is already
compromised. The rest of the time, “the democratic
character of decision making” is only a problem for
the fanatics of process. It’s not a matter of critiquing
assemblies or abandoning them, but of liberating the

1 22 / The Coming Insurrection

speech, gestures, and interplay of beings that take
place within them. We just have to see that each
person comes to an assembly not only with a point
of view or a motion, but with desires, attachments,
capacities, forces, sadnesses and a certain disposition
toward others, an openness. If we manage to set aside
the fantasy of a General Assembly and replace it with
an assembly of presences, if we manage to foil the con-
stantly renewed temptation of hegemony, if we stop
making the decision our final aim, then there is a
chance for a kind of critical mass, one of those
moments of collective crystallization where a deci-
sion suddenly takes hold of beings, completely or
only in part.

The same goes for deciding on actions. By starting
from the principle that “the action in question should
govern the assembly’s agenda” we make both vigorous
debate and effective action impossible. A large assem-
bly made up of people who don’t know each other is
obliged to call on action specialists, that is, to aban-
don action for the sake of its control. On the one
hand, people with mandates are by definition hin-
dered in their actions, on the other hand, nothing
hinders them from deceiving everyone.

There’s no ideal form of action. What’s essential
is that action assume a certain form, that it give rise
to a form instead of having one imposed on it. This
presupposes a shared political and geographical posi-
tion — like the sections of the Paris Commune during

Insurrection / 1 23

the French Revolution — as well as the circulation of
a shared knowledge. As for deciding on actions, the
principle could be as follows: each person should do
their own reconnaissance, the information would
then be put together, and the decision will occur to
us rather than being made by us. The circulation of
knowledge cancels hierarchy; it equalizes by raising
up. Proliferating horizontal communication is also
the best form of coordination among different com-
munes, the best way to put an end to hegemony.

Block the economy, but measure our blockmg power
by our level of self-organization.

At the end of June 2006 in the State of Oaxaca, the
occupations of city halls multiply, and insurgents
occupy public buildings. In certain communes,
mayors are kicked out, official vehicles are requisi-
tioned. A month later, access is cut off to certain
hotels and tourist compounds. Mexico’s Minister of
Tourism speaks of a disaster “comparable to hurri-
cane Wilma.” A few years earlier, blockades had
become the main form of action of the revolt in
Argentina, with different local groups helping each
other by blocking this or that major road, and con-
tinually threatening, through their joint action, to
paralyze the entire country if their demands were
not met. For years such threats have been a powerful
lever for railway workers, truck drivers, and electrical

124 / The Coming Insutrection

and gas supply workers. The movement against the
CPE in France did not hesitate to block train sta-
tions, ring roads, factories, highways, supermarkets
and even airports. In Rennes, only three hundred
people were needed to shut down the main access
road to the town for hours and cause a 40-kilometer
long traffic jam.

Jam everything — this will be the first reflex of all
those who rebel against the present order. In a
delocalized economy where companies function
according to "just-in-time” production, where value
derives from connectedness to the network, where
the highways are links in the chain of dematerialized
production which moves from subcontractor to sub-
contractor and from there to another factory for
assembly, to block circulation is to block production
as well.

But a blockade is only as effective as the insur-
gents’ capacity to supply themselves and to
communicate, as effective as the self-organization of
the different communes. How will we feed ourselves
once everything is paralyzed? Looting stores, as in
Argentina, has its limits; as large as the temples of
consumption are, they are not bottomless pantries.
Acquiring the skills to provide, over time, for one’s
own basic subsistence implies appropriating the
necessary means of its production. And in this
regard, it seems pointless to wait any longer. Letting
two percent of the population produce the food of all

Insorection / 1 25

the others — the situation today — is both a historical
and a strategic anomaly.

Liberate territory from police occupation.

Avoid direct confrontation, if possible.

“This business shows that we are not dealing with
young people making social demands, but with indi-
viduals who are declaring war on the Republic,”
noted a lucid cop about recent clashes. The push to
liberate territory from police occupation is already
underway, and can count on the endless reserves of
resentment that the forces of order have marshaled
against it. Even the "social movements” are gradually
being seduced by the riots, just like the festive crowds
in Rennes who fought the cops every Thursday night
in 2005, or those in Barcelona who destroyed a shop-
ping district during a botellion. The movement
against the CPE witnessed the recurrent return of the
Molotov cocktail. But on this front certain banlieues
remain unsurpassed. Specifically, when it comes to
the technique they’ve been perfecting for some time
now: the surprise attack. Like the one on October 13,
2006 in Epinay. A private-security team headed out
after getting a report of something stolen from a car.
When they arrived, one of the security guards “found
himself blocked by two vehicles parked diagonally
across the street and by more than thirty people car-
rying metal bars and pistols who threw stones at the

1 26 / The Conning Insurreclion

vehicle and used tear gas against the police officers.”
On a smaller scale, think of all the local police sta-
tions attacked in the night: broken windows, burnt-
out cop cars.

One of the results of these recent movements is
the understanding that henceforth a real demon-
stration has to be “wild,” not declared in advance
to the police. Having the choice of terrain, we can,
like the Black Bloc of Genoa in 2001, bypass the
red zones and avoid direct confrontation. By
choosing our own trajectory, we can lead the cops,
including unionist and pacifist ones, rather than
being herded by them. In Genoa we saw a thou-
sand determined people push back entire buses full
of carabinieri , then set their vehicles on fire. The
important thing is not to be better armed but to
take the initiative. Courage is nothing, confidence
in your own courage is everything. Having the
initiative helps.

Everything points, nonetheless, toward a con-
ception of direct confrontations as that which pins
down opposing forces, buying us time and allowing
us to attack elsewhere — even nearby. The fact that
we cannot prevent a confrontation from occurring
doesn’t prevent us from making it into a simple
diversion. Even more than to actions, we must
commit ourselves to their coordination. Harassing
the police means that by forcing them to be every-
where they can no longer be effective anywhere.

Insurrection / 1 27

Every act of harassment revives this truth, spoken
in 1 842: “The life of the police agent is painful; his
position in society is as humiliating and despised as
crime itself. . . Shame and infamy encircle him from
all sides, society expels him, isolates him as a pariah,
society spits out its disdain for the police agent along
with his pay, without remorse, without regrets, with-
out pity... The police badge that he carries in his
pocket documents his shame.” On November 21,
2006, firemen demonstrating in Paris attacked the
riot police with hammers and injured fifteen of
them. This by way of a reminder that wanting to
“protect and serve” can never be an excuse for joining
the police.

Take up arms. Do everything possible to make their use
unnecessary. Against the army the only victory is political.

There is no such thing as a peaceful insurrection.
Weapons are necessary; it’s a question of doing every-
thing possible to make using them unnecessary. An
insurrection is more about taking up arms and main-
taining an “armed presence” than it is about armed
struggle. We need to distinguish clearly between
being armed and the use of arms. Weapons are a con-
stant in revolutionary situations, but their use is
infrequent and rarely decisive at key turning points:
August 10th 1792, March 18th 1871, October 1917.
When power is in the gutter, it’s enough to walk over it.

1 28 / The Coming Insurrection

Because of the distance that separates us from
them, weapons have taken on a kind of double
character of fascination and disgust that can be
overcome only by handling them. An authentic
pacifism cannot mean refusing weapons, but only
refusing to use them. Pacifism without being able to
fire a shot is nothing but the theoretical formulation
of impotence. Such a priori pacifism is a kind of
preventive disarmament, a pure police operation. In
reality, the question of pacifism is serious only for
those who have the ability to open fire. In this case,
pacifism becomes a sign of power, since it’s only in
an extreme position of strength that we are freed
from the need to fire.

From a strategic point of view, indirect, asymmet-
rical action seems the most effective kind, the one
best suited to our time: you don’t attack an occupying
army frontally. That said, the prospect of Iraq-style
urban guerilla warfare, dragging on with no possi-
bility of taking the offensive, is more to be feared
than to be desired. The militarization of civil war is
the defeat of insurrection. The Reds had their vic-
tory in 1921, but the Russian Revolution was
already lost.

We must consider two kinds of state reaction.
One openly hostile, one more sly and democratic.
The first calls for our out-and-out destruction, the
second, a subtle but implacable hostility, seeks only
to recruit us. We can be defeated both by dictatorship

Insurrection / 1 29

and by being reduced to opposing only dictatorship.
Defeat consists as much in losing the war as in losing
the choice of which war to wage. Both are possible,
as was proven by Spain in 1 936: the revolutionaries
there were defeated twice-over, by fascism and by
the Republic.

When things get serious, the army occupies the
terrain. Whether or not it engages in combat is less
certain. That would require that the state be com-
mitted to a bloodbath, which for now is no more
than a threat, a bit like the threat of using nuclear
weapons for the last fifty years. Though it has been
wounded for a long while, the beast of the state is
still dangerous. A massive crowd would be needed to
challenge the army, invading its ranks and fraternizing
with the soldiers. We need a March 18th, 1871.
When the army is in the street, we have an insurrec-
tionary situation. Once the army engages, the
outcome is precipitated. Everyone finds themselves
forced to take sides, to choose between anarchy and
the fear of anarchy. An insurrection triumphs as a
political force. It is not impossible to defeat an
army politically.

Depose authorities at a local level.

The goal of any insurrection is to become irre-
versible. It becomes irreversible when you’ve defeated
both authority and the need for authority, property

1 30 / The Coming InsuiTection

and the taste for appropriation, hegemony and the
desire for hegemony. That is why the insurrectionary
process carries within itself the form of its victory, or
that of its defeat. Destruction has never been enough
to make things irreversible. What matters is how it’s
done. There are ways of destroying that unfailingly
provoke the return of what has been crushed.
Whoever wastes their energy on the corpse of an
order can be sure that this will arouse the desire for
vengeance. Thus, wherever the economy is blocked
and the police are neutralized, it is important to
invest as little pathos as possible in overthrowing the
authorities. They must be deposed with the most
scrupulous indifference and derision.

In times like these, the end of centralized revolu-
tions reflects the decentralization of power. Winter
Palaces still exist but they have been relegated to
assaults by tourists rather than revolutionary hordes.
Today it is possible to take over Paris, Rome, or
Buenos Aires without it being a decisive victory.
Taking over Rungis would certainly be more effective
than taking over the Elysee Palace. Power is no longer
concentrated in one point in the world; it is the
world itself, its flows and its avenues, its people and
its norms, its codes and its technologies. Power is the
organization of the metropolis itself It is the impec-
cable totality of the world of the commodity at. each
of its points. Anyone who defeats it locally sends a
planetary shock wave through its networks. The riots

Insurrection / 1 31

that began in Clichy-sous-Bois filled more than one
American household with joy, while the insurgents of
Oaxaca found accomplices right in the heart of Paris.
For France, the loss of centralized power signifies the
end of Paris as the center of revolutionary activity.
Every new movement since the strikes of 1995 has
confirmed this. It’s no longer in Paris that the most
daring and consistent actions are carried out. To put
it blundy, Paris now stands out only as a target for
raids, as a pure terrain to be plundered and ravaged.
Brief and brutal incursions from the outside strike at
the metropolitan flows at their point of maximum
density. Rage streaks across this desert of fake abun-
dance, then vanishes. A day will come when this
capital and its horrible concretion of power will lie in
majestic ruins, but it will be at the end of a process
that will be far more advanced everywhere else.

1 32 / The Coming Insurrection

ALL power to the communes!

In the subway, tlxre’s no longer any trace of the screen of
embarrassment that normally impedes the gestures of the
passengers. Strangers make conversation without making
passes. A band of comrades conferring on a street corner.
Much larger assemblies on the boulevards, absorbed in dis-
cussions. Surprise attacks mounted in city after city, day
after day. A new military barracks has been sacked and
burned to the ground. The evicted residents of a building
have stopped negotiating with the mayor’s office; t/xy set-
tle in. A company manager is inspired to blow away a
handful of his colleagues in the middle of a meeting.
There's been a leak of files containing tlx personal addresses
of all tlx cops, together with those of prison officials,
causing an unprecedented wave of sudden relocations. We
carry our surplus goods into the old village bar and grocery
store, and take what we lack. Some of us stay long enough
to discuss the general situation and figure out the hard-
ware we need for the machine shop. Tlx radio keeps tlx
insurgents informed of the retreat of the government forces.
A rocket has just breached a wall of the Clairvaux prison.
Impossible to say if it has been months or years since the
"events" began. And the prime minister seems very alone in
his appeals for calm.

135

It’s useless to wait— for a breakthrough, for the
revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social
movement. To go on waiting is madness. The
catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are
already situated within the collapse of a civilization.
It is within this reality that we must choose sides.

Semiotext(e)

distributed by The MIT Press
ISBN-13: 978-1-58435-080-4